Finnish payroll handling (monthly pay run)
Finnish payroll handling (monthly pay run)
This workflow describes the bookkeeping core of running payroll in a small company: ensuring the chart of accounts, accounting entity, and periods are in place; maintaining the employee register; running payroll for a month with a chosen pay date; producing balanced posting intent for wages and withholdings; and feeding those postings into the journal and later into bank and reconciliation steps. The journey is expressed in BusDK datasets and bus payroll commands so that salary and tax entries stay traceable and double-entry consistent.
Prerequisites
Payroll depends on the same master data as the rest of the accounting workflow. The chart of accounts must include the accounts used for wage expense, withholding payables, and net pay (and, where applicable, employer-side costs). The accounting entity and accounting periods must be configured so that the payroll month and pay date fall within an open period. Alice ensures these are in place using bus accounts, bus entities, and bus period before setting up employees or running payroll.
Employee register and payroll run data
Payroll datasets include employees, payruns, payments, and posting-account mappings at workspace root. The employees records store employee identity, entity reference, dates, gross pay, withholding rate, and ledger accounts. These accounts are used to produce balanced posting lines.
Use bus payroll validate to check that the full payroll dataset is internally consistent before exporting postings.
Exporting postings for a month
In the current module release, postings are produced by exporting a selected final payrun:
bus payroll validate
bus payroll export pr-001
export produces deterministic posting CSV lines for journal import workflows. The export keeps payroll-to-journal traceability explicit through payrun and employee identifiers in each row.
From posting intent to journal and bank
The posting output from bus payroll export is intended to be consumed by the journal. Alice (or a script) appends the posting lines to the workspace journal dataset using bus journal add or an equivalent append path so that payroll appears in the same ledger as invoices and other transactions. Once in the journal, payroll postings participate in trial balance and period close like any other entries. When net pay is later paid from the company bank account, that bank transaction is imported with bus bank import and can be matched or reconciled against the payroll-related journal entries using bus reconcile, keeping the link between pay run, ledger, and bank statement explicit.
Scope: what works today versus planned
Today the bus-payroll module implements validate and export. Integration tests in the module repository prove that validation succeeds for complete payroll datasets and that export produces deterministic CSV posting lines for a given run; global flags (including -C, -o, -q, -v, --color, --format) are covered by unit and integration tests. The end-to-end journey from empty workspace through employee register and monthly run to journal append is not yet first-class in this module, because commands such as init, run, list, and employee maintenance are still planned. In practice you can maintain payroll CSV and schema files (by hand or by another tool), run bus payroll validate to check consistency, and run bus payroll export <run-id> to obtain posting CSV for manual or scripted journal append.
Planned extensions include first-class init, run, list, and employee command surfaces, deeper employer-cost handling, and integration with authority filing (for example tax and pension reporting). Those are out of scope for this workflow page; the Development status table summarizes current readiness per module for this journey.