The payroll import utility is a new import routine designed to simplify the importing of payroll transactions into the cost and general ledgers.

It is designed as a replacement of the existing payroll processing within the Weekly and Monthly personnel modules. The payroll import is designed to take the results of an external payroll run and journal the resulting figures into EasyBuild, applying validation against the personnel setup details, but does not store or calculate any employee specific data in the personnel module.

The import utility can be found in both the Weekly and Monthly personnel modules. Assuming the internal payroll feature is disabled then Import Payroll Transactions will appear on the weekly and monthly personnel main menu as shown below:

User security is via the existing Input Transaction setting. This must be checked on the Monthly Personnel User profile or set to Full on the Weekly.

When the menu item is selected the following screen is displayed

The data format required for the import file is shown in this example below:

Where the columns are as follows:

Required.
This must be one of EMP or Control.

If the row is of type EMP this represents the gross payroll amount for this employee that will be job costed to the project. The row must then have a valid Project_Id and a valid Cost_Head.

If the import is at the employee level there must be one emp row per employee and each must have a valid Employee Id. As an option the employee name can be placed in the narrative or narrative_2 columns. If the import is at Cost Level then there must have a valid Project and Cost Head and have one EMP row per unique Project / Cost Head combination and employee can be left blank.

If the row is of type Control then it must have a valid General Ledger Account Id that matches on of the Control Accounts specified in the Personnel System Setup. Optionally, the control account description can be written in the narrative or narrative_2 columns.

This is the date the payroll is valid for. It should be consistent with the tax week / tax month specified on the import

Required if type = EMP

The project column should contain a valid project Id from the projects module within EasyBuild for the company selected on the import.

Required if type = EMP
The cost head column should contain a valid cost head as defined in System Setup / Cost Heads

Required if type = EMP and Style = Employee Level
If the import is down at the employee level then each EMP row should have a valid Employee Id from either the Weekly or Monthly personnel form. Note, you cannot mix weekly and monthly monthly same import.

Required if type = Control
This must contain a valid GL Account Id that matches one of the control accounts defined on the System Setup Personnel screen.

Any text entered in this column will be included in the general ledger and / or cost ledger transactions narrative columns.

Any text entered in this column will be included in the general ledger and / or cost ledger transactions narrative columns.

Required
This must be a valid numeric value, credits positive, debits negative

As not all data sources will contain the same data or be known by the same names we have the ability to define one or more templates to map the input data source to the required columns in EasyBuild.

To create a new template press New or to amend an existing template, select the template by name from the drop down and press Amend.

This will open the manage template form as either a blank form or with the existing data loaded.

To create a new template first give it a name. This will appear in the drop down list on the import form. Optionally, add a short description as well.

Specify the file format. This tells the system how to read the file and what level of import is it defining.

Select either Employee Level or Cost Level.

Then pick an example import file and press Load Sample. This will read the first few rows into the Sample Data grid and allow you to map data file columns to the elements required.

Under column mappings for each data element, select the file column to map to it. If an element is optional then select <None> to ignore it. For a date column optionally enter the date format to translate from.

Here is an example:

When you are happy click OK.

To run an import enter the following data:

Finally browse to the file to import. This can either be a excel spreadsheet (.xlsx) or a csv text file.

To run the import press OK.

If the import is successful the following dialog will appear if thee is a validation issue with the data then a message such as that below will be shown in which case amend the data / fix the errors as required and try again. You can also view the error messages by pressing the View Log button.

If there is a problem reading the file or a row of data is corrupted and cannot be read them this will be recorded in the error log which can be analyzed and fixed.

Press the View Log button to open the current log file in notepad. By default the log file is called Payroll_Journal_Import.Log and is created in the same folder as the file being imported.

When the data has been imported successfully and you click on the Import completed, opening Review/Commit form OK button the following screen is displayed.

This summarizes the general ledger and cost ledger postings that are about to take place. It is not possible to amend the postings (this must be done by amending the original file and re-importing). The options are to Commit Transactions which will post to the ledgers or to Abandon which will remove the temporary transactions completely.

If you press Exit to close the form without pressing Commit or Abandon then you will be prompted with this dialog:

Answer No to return to the review and commit screen.

If you answer Yes to continue to close the form without Committing or Abandoning then the temporary transactions are left in the system and can be accessed via the review and commit options in the General Ledger module and Projects module as if you had manually entered a cost or general ledger journal. This does give the ability to edit the temporary transactions if required.