StillTrue

Payroll to the general ledger, for the person who prepares it.

Close software is built for the person reviewing the reconciliation — the workflow, the sign-off, the audit trail. The person preparing it still builds the workpaper in Excel and uploads it as support.

So here is the workpaper. It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and nothing you type into it leaves your machine.

What is in it

• Two proofs, not one. Expense accounts are proved on period activity. Balance sheet accounts — net pay payable, tax payable, pension payable — are proved on a roll-forward: opening, plus charged, plus remitted, against the closing balance. Templates that use a single column for both produce a number that is not a variance.
• Register → journal as posted → GL. If the journal is a file you edit by hand before posting, this separates a bad edit from a bad posting instead of leaving you with one difference and no idea which half broke.
• A clearing account proof that ages open items. The test is not that the balance is zero — a clearing account legitimately carries one when pay date and settlement straddle the period end. The test is that the balance equals the open items you have listed, and that nothing is quietly getting older.
• Pre-post checks for before the journal goes in: hours against the timekeeping system, period-over-period movement by pay code, gross to net, net pay against the payment file and the bank, whether the journal balances, and whether a leaver is still being paid.
• Twenty-four reconciling items, each marked as normally legitimate, normally an error, or check both — because finding the difference is quick and explaining it is the work.
• A printable workpaper with prepared, reviewed and approved lines, scoped to one account, that will not go green for an account it cannot find.

Two things you should know before you trust it

I am not an accountant. I am a platform engineer. Every default in the workbook is written down on a Sources tab with where it came from, so you can see what it was based on and change it — and the handful that have no public source say so, in the file.

I have an interest here. I am looking into whether there is a product in this problem, which is why I would like to talk to people who do this job. The workbook is free either way. There is no signup, no email gate, and it does not report anything back — no macros, no add-ins, no connections.

The workbook

Download the workbook (.xlsx) — opens with example rows filled in so you can see how it works. They are invented. Delete them.