As a business owner, it’s your job to pay your share of the taxes and manage tax withholdings from employee paychecks. And until all those taxes are deposited to their final destinations, they’re payroll liabilities. Payroll liabilities, or payables , are amounts you currently owe, pertaining to your business’s payroll. If you’re using a payroll journal, you enter payables as credits because you are increasing the amount you owe. Examples of payroll liabilities include employee wages or compensation and payroll taxes. The purpose of payroll accounting is to keep track of employee compensation and related payroll costs.
You may need a payroll service or payroll software—and likely even a time tracking software—to manage that. Accrued wages for a certain period are recorded at the end of your accounting period. As the name suggests, these are wages that you owe your employees—wages you haven’t yet paid. After you pay these wages, you’ll make reversed entries in your ledger to account for this payment. When you or your bookkeeper goes to close the books for November, $700 will need to be recorded as a credit to be paid in your accrued payroll account. When you pay the full $1,000 balance on Dec. 3, you’ll clear the balance by debiting the account for $700.
Journal Entry to Record Accrued Vacation
Use this type of entry if you have to adjust an employee’s pay. For example, you’d use a manual entry if you recently promoted an employee or let someone go. You pay unemployment taxes, both federal and state (if applicable), separately from the taxes shown in Journal 2 and Journal 3. Payroll accounting keeps track of five essential payroll-related costs and obligations. You’ll use these to calculate withholdings for each employee.
For example, workers’ compensation is recognized as an expense once the time period that the premium covers has elapsed. At that time, if the payment has not been made, the amount becomes a debt and should be recorded as a liability until it’s paid to the insurance provider. Small businesses rarely record this liability in their books. But business owners should keep in mind how many hours they’ll need to pay out in the future. A liability is an amount you owe, while an expense is an amount you’ve already paid.
Using an existing payroll service
Journal 1 shows the employee’s gross wages ($1,200 for the week). After subtracting some of the most common payroll taxes, the employee’s wages payable or “take-home” pay is $925. This will ensure your journal entries have additional eyes on them before they post; it can also be helpful if you’re out on a day that payroll journal entries need to be posted.
Depending on the type of work you do and your location, you may have to meet certain payroll requirements. Restaurant owners, for instance, need to ensure their tipped employees meet minimum-wage requirements. You may have employees who earn overtime at a rate of time-and-a-half or even double time.
Examples of payroll expenses
An expense can be a liability, albeit temporarily, until it’s paid. Payroll accounting is the recording and tracking of all payroll transactions. These transactions include paychecks distributed to employees, deductions and taxes withheld from employee paychecks, and employers’ share of benefit contributions and taxes. In that journal entry, payroll accounting examples you’re recording all of the deductions you have to take, as a business owner, from the employee’s check. For transparency and visibility, employees can find these deductions on their pay stubs. One method for recording payroll is to create journal entries to account for each piece of payroll, including employee paychecks and employer taxes.
Similar to accrued vacation pay, you’ll also need to keep track of the amount of sick pay an employee has earned on the books. You can establish how much sick pay an employee would earn per pay period (as we did in the above accrued vacation pay example). For example, let’s say your business runs payroll bi-weekly. Then employees receive their paychecks for that pay period on January 17.
Record Payroll Journal Entries
Check the numbers against the data you gathered from your payroll system. Does the total gross wage expense entry tie to your total payroll expense for the period? Be sure to confirm that your debits equal your credits (basic accounting systems should confirm this). Recording payroll on your books involves making sure that amounts are accurately posted to payroll accounts. Before you can record payroll, you will need to set up payroll accounts on your chart of accounts list.
