Payroll Posting is where you tell include GO which General Ledger accounts a payroll run writes to when it posts. Posting a payroll turns the run's amounts into a balanced GL entry — wage costs on the debit side, and a set of liability and clearing accounts on the credit side. This page maps those credit-side accounts. Until every one of them is set, the Post step in Payroll stays blocked.
Where to find Payroll Posting
From the left sidebar choose HR & Payroll, then Payroll Posting (near the bottom of the section).
At the top, a summary card shows how many of the five required accounts are configured — 5/5 Configured in green when you're done, with a warning that all accounts must be configured before posting payroll until then.
The five account mappings
Each field is a picker over your Chart of Accounts. The first four live under Liabilities; the last is Net Pay:
| Mapping | What posts there |
|---|---|
| Accrued Payroll | The wage-accrual liability — the offset for payroll that's been earned but not yet paid out. |
| Employer Tax Payable | The employer's own tax burden (the taxes your business owes on top of wages). |
| Employee Withholding | Everything withheld from employees' pay for taxes — federal, state, Social Security, Medicare — collected here as one total per person. |
| Employee Deduction | Everything withheld for deductions — benefits, 401(k), garnishments — as one total per person. |
| Net Pay | The net-pay payable / clearing account — what employees actually receive, typically flushed by the check run or ACH file. |
Pick each account and click Save Payroll Posting Settings.
Per-bucket breakout (coming soon)
Below the active fields you'll see a locked Per-bucket breakout section — separate accounts for Social Security, Medicare, state and local withholding, and pre-tax 401(k) and health deductions. These are shown for awareness but can't be edited yet: today, all withholdings post to the single Employee Withholding account and all deductions to Employee Deduction. A future update will let you split them out per bucket.
How these settings affect the Post step
When you post a run from the Payroll Control Center:
- GO builds a balanced GL entry: labor costs are debited to the expense accounts driven by each hour's project, task, and pay classification, plus employer taxes and burden.
- The credit side goes to the accounts on this page — withholding to Employee Withholding, deductions to Employee Deduction, the employer burden to Employer Tax Payable, and the take-home amount to Net Pay.
- If any of the five accounts is missing, the pre-post check reports "A required posting account isn't configured" and the Post payroll button stays hidden. Come back here, complete the mapping, and the blocker clears.
See Payroll, Step 8, for the full posting walkthrough.
Permissions
This page is part of payroll setup — viewing and editing it require the payroll-posting settings permission, usually held by payroll leads and administrators. See Roles & Permissions.
Tips & best practices
- Set this up before your first run. It's a five-minute task here versus a confusing blocker at post time.
- Use dedicated liability accounts. Give payroll its own accrual, withholding, deduction, and tax-payable accounts rather than sharing a general "Accrued liabilities" — reconciliation gets much easier.
- Coordinate with your accountant on which Chart of Accounts entries these should be — they're the accounts your balance sheet will carry payroll liabilities in.
Common questions
Payroll won't post and mentions a posting account — is that this page? Yes. The pre-post check blocks until all five accounts here are configured. Set the missing one and re-open the POST tile.
Where do the wage expense (debit) accounts come from? Not from this page — labor cost is routed by the work itself: the project/task and the pay classification's accrual GL account. This page maps only the credit-side liability and clearing accounts.
Can I split Social Security from federal withholding? Not yet — the per-bucket fields are visible but locked. Everything posts to the combined Employee Withholding and Employee Deduction accounts for now.
Related topics
- Payroll — the Post step these accounts feed.
- Chart of Accounts — the accounts you're mapping to.
- General Ledger Configuration — the equivalent mappings for procurement and AR.
- Deductions — what flows into the Employee Deduction account.