FormerMember

Payroll - meal allowances - how can I recode a years worth of meal allowances that were posted to an asset account rather than expense account?

Posted By FormerMember

Hi

New to this - hope I'm posting correctly. I just started in the midst of year-end with a company & am compiling & reviewing the financial statements.
Looking for advice on how to re-code a years worth of payroll entries -- whereby the 'meal allowance expense' portion of each employees pay cheque was automatically posted (linked accounts) to a balance sheet account rather than the expense account.

I have 1-2 thousand entries that this impacts where I need to reclassify from the balance sheet to the expense account.  ---- Is there a quick way to do this?   Keep in mind I need the amounts to be associated to the employee +  allocated to a large number of different jobs.

Originally I thought of posting a general journal wiping out the entire balance at the total amount for the year (single amount) and posting that total to expense (dr. meal allowance expense, cr. meal allowance receivable (the odd/error balance sheet account the payroll was linked to for meal allowances)), but then my job allocations wouldn't be accurate as it is allocated to job BY EMPLOYEE.

If I go the general journal route and code the journal entry by employee (rather than sum amount - so I can properly allocate to the jobs), I'd be looking at thousands of lines for the JEs. 
However, with the general journal route I can't actually link/associate these meal allowance amounts to the employees they stem from - thus my employee records for meal allowances wont reconcile to the total amount of meal allowances expenses in the GL. Hard to articulate this --- but I want to ensure I still have the total meal allowances per employee for the year tracked & know it's accurate in the payroll module. 

I also thought of creating a spreadsheet to summarize the weighting of each job, and post the total re-class with a weighting towards each respective job...  however...  again... my employee year to date meal allowance amounts may not reconcile to the total meal allowances expense GL. 

I'm not familiar with 'adjustments' in the payroll module especially when it's a simple account re-classification...Any input would be greatly appreciated --- payroll and the payroll module are not my forte! 

Thanks in advance!!

  • Since it looks like you are using Sage 50 Canada, I am going to move this post to that Support Group so that other users of this software will see it and can offer you their thoughts and insight.

    Thanks,
    Derek

  • Unknown said:
    the 'meal allowance expense' portion of each employees pay cheque was automatically posted (linked accounts) to a balance sheet account rather than the expense account.

    If I understand you correctly, someone went to the trouble of linking the reimbursement to an employee to a liability account and allocating that to a project.  A negative deduction is harder to enter than a simple (non-taxable) reimbursement.  Were they possibly intending to then claim the included Sales Tax and bill some amount to clients based on the Project allocations in that account?  Or was it just... wrong?

    Unknown said:
    Originally I thought of posting a general journal wiping out the entire balance at the total amount for the year (single amount) and posting that total to expense (dr. meal allowance expense, cr. meal allowance receivable (the odd/error balance sheet account the payroll was linked to for meal allowances)), but then my job allocations wouldn't be accurate as it is allocated to job BY EMPLOYEE.

    It may be better to run Project reports and allocate / expense / bill / adjust for that period. 

    Unknown said:
    If I go the general journal route and code the journal entry by employee (rather than sum amount - so I can properly allocate to the jobs), I'd be looking at thousands of lines for the JEs.

    Journal entries can be imported from a properly formatted text file, so entering thousands of lines of detail might mean 2 days getting the data ready and testing on a restored copy, and 10 minutes importing it.

    Unknown said:
    Hard to articulate this --- but I want to ensure I still have the total meal allowances per employee for the year tracked & know it's accurate in the payroll module. 

    I wouldn't think you would need an audit trail with all the detail in the G/L, so long as all the detail is available in the payroll + Project records.  If you put it into an Excel table and run a pivot to get summary GL entries, then there's enough information there for anyone to do the same in the future if there's a question.  (But I would hang on to that Excel sheet!)

    Unknown said:
    I'm not familiar with 'adjustments' in the payroll module especially when it's a simple account re-classification...

    I would not go the route of adjusting past payroll entries.  Tax and deduction amounts may be recalculated automatically based on changes to the employee record, and you will have extra work just to get the basic payroll data re-entered correctly.  Automatic Adjustments in Sage 50 result in a reversed + new entry for every line.  Before doing this, restore a test copy of your company to a temporary location (i.e. your Windows desktop) bang in a few dozen, and look at the reports / results.