Determining which GL Account to Use

The MYOB Advanced Payroll system uses a set of rules and entities to determine which General Ledger account transactions for each pay item should be posted to:

  • Pay items are linked with a General Ledger Purpose, which determines how the pay item will behave when being posted to GL journals.
  • Employees are linked with a Posting Class, which determines the General Ledger accounts that each General Ledger Purpose should post to.

Therefore, when the system generates journals for each pay item in a pay, it determines the GL account for each journal by taking the GL Purpose assigned to the pay item, and looking it up in the Posting Class assigned to the pay item's employee. The ability to create multiple Posting Classes makes it possible for the same pay item to be posted to different General Ledger accounts for different employees.

Note: If the pay item's GL Purpose is not included in the employee's Posting Class, an error message will appear when processing the pay.

General Ledger Purposes

General Ledger Purposes determine how pay items will behave when being posted to GL journals. They also determine the behaviour of expenses and liabilities that aren't related to pay items, e.g. withholding tax or Workcover/ACC. General Ledger Purposes are created on the General Ledger Purpose (MP.PP.10.20) form.

A GL purpose is assigned to each pay item on the Pay Items form. Default GL Purposes can be set up for pay items on the Pay Item Types (MP.PP.21.60) form.

Posting Classes

GL purposes are grouped into Posting Classes, which are created on the Posting Classes (MP.PP.10.30) form. A Posting Class specifies the General Ledger accounts and subaccounts that each GL purpose should be posted to.

Note: A special case exists for GL Purposes that are assigned the "Supplier" Liability Group (see below). In such cases, no account or subaccount needs to be entered for the GL purpose; instead, the account details are taken from the supplier specified for the related pay item on the Additional Info tab of the Pay Items (MP.PP.22.10) form.

Each GL purpose is assigned a Liability Group, which tells the system what the GL Purpose relates to and how it should be grouped for reporting. For those liabilities that do not have an associated pay item, e.g. withholding tax or Workcover/ACC, the Liability Group is how the system determines where to post journals for these liabilities. The following liability groups are available:

  • ACC Levy (NZ only)
  • ESCT (NZ only)
  • Not Applicable
  • Payroll Tax (AU only)
  • Student Loan (NZ only)
  • Supplier
  • Withholding
  • Workcover (AU only)

Posting classes can be assigned to employee classes on the Employee Classes (EP.20.20.00) form, so that all employees assigned to that class will have their pay items allocated as set in the Posting Class. The default Posting Class specified by an employee's class can be overridden for that employee on the Analysis tab of the Pay Details (MP.PP.23.10) form.

Splitting General Ledger Account Allocations on Pay Items

The Employee's Current Pay (MP.PP.31.30) form shows the details of all pay items in an employee's pay, including the General Ledger accounts that each will be posted to. Clicking on the account number for a pay item opens the Allocate General Ledger Accounts (MP.PP.30.02) form, where it is possible to split a General Ledger allocation for the pay item to multiple accounts. Where a pay item has been allocated across multiple accounts, the GL Account column for that item will display "Allocated [X]" where X is the number of accounts it has been split across.

Pay Clearing Account

A separate clearing account is needed for journals relating to pay liabilities, i.e. wage or salary amounts from completed pays that have not yet been paid to employees. Accounts can be specified for each branch by setting the Pay Clearing Account and Pay Clearing Sub Account fields on the Branches (CS.10.20.00) form. The default accounts are specified by setting the Pay Clearing Account and Pay Clearing Sub Account fields on the Payroll Preferences (MP.PP.11.00) form - these accounts are used only if there are no accounts specified for the branch(es) involved in the pay.