Hand claims to payroll

Handing salary-paid claims to payroll

By the end of this guide, the claims your staff are paid through payroll will reach their payslips once each: none dropped, none paid twice. It is for whoever takes approved expense claims into the payroll each month, at a company whose claim items are set to Salary Payment. It takes about 20 minutes a month per company.

Where BigLedger stops. A Salary Payment claim line goes straight to APPROVED at its last supervisor approval, skips finance review, and is listed for payroll. BigLedger computes no salary, posts no journal for the claim, and never records that a claim was paid: the line stays APPROVED after the payslip that paid it. So the record of what payroll paid is the one you keep.

The steps at a glance.

Know which two dates decide what joins the month.
Export each cycle that holds your employees’ claims.
Count and total each file.
Find what fell between cycles.
Keep the register of claims paid outside a cycle.
Look at last month’s cycle once more after payroll closes.
Give finance the claims by account for the journal.

Meet GadgetSphere

GadgetSphere Sdn Bhd (GS) pays mileage and parking with salary, through a bureau whose cut-off is the 27th. Its March claim cycle’s approval cut-off is 25 March. On the 26th the cycle lists 46 lines, among them a GS-KV-01 supervisor’s RM 280 mileage. A second line of hers, RM 64, is approved on 28 March. A GS-PEN-01 sales executive’s RM 150 parking, run up at the fulfilment centre, was charged to GadgetSphere Online Sdn Bhd (GSO). The figures are illustrative.

Before you start

The claim items are set. Each item you pay with salary has Payment Processing Option = Salary Payment in the Claim Applet.
Every company has a cut-off row (Claim Cut-Off Logic). Without one no monthly cycle is created and no line has a cycle to join.
You have decided about Auto-add approved claims to active cycle on each company’s cut-off row. With it on, a late approval joins the current month’s open cycle instead of none, but it joins after that cycle’s cut-off, so it can arrive after you exported. Step 6 catches it either way.
You can see the cycle’s Payroll Payment tab. It can be hidden by Hide Salary Payment Tab in your own personal settings in the Claim Cycle applet.
You and the payroll owner agree which BigLedger employee code is which payroll number, and that list is kept with the payroll file. The file’s key is the code copied onto the line when the claim was submitted.

Step 1: Know which two dates decide the month

Menu: Claim Cycle Applet, the month’s cycle, Main Details.

A line joins the cycle of the company it is charged to, for the month of its last approval, and only if the approval is on or before that cycle’s approval cut-off: Supervisor Approval End Date on Main Details. (The one exception is a line finance put on hold until a later date: approved by that date, it joins even after the cut-off.) The date at the top of the Payroll Payment tab is a different one, the finance cut-off. Read the approval date. You export between it and the payroll cut-off: for GS in March, on the 26th, after the 25 March approval cut-off and before the bureau’s 27th.

Step 2: Export each cycle that holds your employees’ claims

Menu: Claim Cycle Applet › the cycle › Payroll Payment › Export.

Export your own company’s cycle, and the cycles of every group company your people charge claims to. The RM 150 parking is on GSO’s March cycle and in GSO’s file, although GS employs and pays the person, because a cycle follows the charged-to company and your payroll follows the employer. The file has three columns, the employee code, the claim item code and the amount including tax, and nothing about the employer. Send each payroll only its own employees’ rows, matched on the code.

The file has one row per claim line, not one per person: a supervisor with three mileage lines is three rows. The payroll adds them up.

Step 3: Count and total each file

Who: you. Time: two minutes per file.

Neither screen totals the amount, so total the file’s amount column in a spreadsheet. The row count equals the tab’s line count, 46 for GS in March, and the total is what the payroll adds to pay as claims: RM 9,870.40.

The file has more rows than the tab? The tab lists lines that are APPROVED, PENDING_DOC_REVIEW or ON_HOLD; the file takes every Salary Payment line on the cycle, whatever its status. Find the extra line on the cycle’s Claim Lines tab and decide about it before the file leaves you.

Step 4: Find what fell between cycles

Menu: Claim Cycle Applet › Payroll Payment Report.

The report lists Salary Payment lines from every month, with no date filter, and shows each line’s Claim ID but not its cycle. So find a line no cycle holds by running it twice for each company: once with Claim Cycle left empty, and once with every cycle of that company chosen. A Claim ID on the first list and not on the second is on no cycle: GadgetSphere’s RM 64, approved after the cut-off with Auto-add off. Pay it from the register (Step 5), never from the report alone.

It loads at most 1,000 lines, in no useful order, and it only grows. A salary-paid line stays APPROVED for good, so a list of exactly 1,000 may be cut short, and filtering by status will not shorten it. Once a company’s list reaches 1,000, this report can no longer prove that nothing fell between cycles. Switch on Auto-add for that company: every approval after the cut-off then lands on a cycle at once, the cycles’ tabs hold every line, and Step 6 catches the late ones. Its Export Report copies the grid. It is a working list, not a file your payroll imports.

Step 5: Keep the register of claims paid outside a cycle

Who: you. Where: a spreadsheet filed with the payroll.

GadgetSphere pays the RM 64 in April and writes its Claim ID in the April payroll file and in the register. Because nothing marks it paid, the same line is on the empty-cycle report in May, June and every month after. Nothing in BigLedger will ever say it is done; the register, with the payroll file it points to, is how you know. Before you add any line from that report to a payslip, look for its Claim ID in the register and in the files of earlier months.

Step 6: Look at last month’s cycle once more

When: after the payroll closes.

Open the cycle you exported and compare its Payroll Payment tab with the file you sent. With Auto-add on, the RM 64 joined the March cycle on the 28th, after you exported on the 26th, so the tab now shows 47 lines and your file had 46. Anything that arrived late is paid next month and goes on the register.

Step 7: Give finance the claims by account

Who: you, to whoever posts the payroll journal.

A Salary Payment claim reaches the ledger only inside the payroll journal, and it belongs in what the claim was for, not in wages. To see the accounts, add Salary Payment to your own Default Payment Processing Option in the Claim Cycle applet’s settings, and keep Finance Payment selected too, or your own PV Details Report stops showing finance-paid claims. The cycle’s PV Details Report then lists the salary lines with each line’s expense GL code. It leaves out non-reimbursable, withdrawn and rejected lines, which the file does not, so its total can differ from the file’s. Hand finance the totals by account (Posting the month’s payroll journal, Step 3).

What success looks like

The payroll’s claims total for the month equals the totals of the files you exported plus the register’s additions. Every Claim ID the report lists with no cycle is on the register, while the report is shorter than 1,000 lines; after that, Auto-add is on for the company and last month’s tab matches the file you sent plus what you carried forward. A difference you cannot name is a claim paid twice or not at all.

Common mistakes

What you see	Why	What to do
An approved claim is on nobody’s payslip	Approved after the cut-off, charged to another company, or joined the cycle after you exported	An approved salary-paid claim never reached the payslip
A claimant was paid the same claim twice	It was paid by hand from the report and again from last month’s tab, where Auto-add had put it after you exported	Check the register and earlier files for its Claim ID before paying a line
Payroll rejects an employee code	The code is the one copied at submission, or the person is on another company’s payroll	Correct the row; send it to the employer’s payroll
The file will not import into payroll	It came from the report’s Export Report	Use Export on the cycle’s Payroll Payment tab
Mileage sits inside wages in the accounts	The claims were added into the wages line	Give finance the totals by claim item account (Step 7)