Hi All,

I need help again.

We have no payroll system, so everything is done manually on pastel. I’m very new to this (Payroll), but I think I get how it works and what needs to be done.

So the lady that used to do this left in September 2018, so I have a year’s worth of catching up to do. My 1st challenge is how to fix/update the PAYE, UIF & other accounts, given the way previous transactions have been done.

When capturing the weekly wages in the bank cash book, the previous lady would enter the gross wage per employee, and then deduct PAYE, UIF & Union Fees etc. by doing additional (negative) payment entries to the applicable ledgers, using the same reference numbers. The result being the Nett Wage paid per employee reflected as a consolidated entry in the cashbook detailed ledger, which corresponds to the bank statement, and the employees’ wages’ ledgers reflect their Gross Wages paid, and then of course the PAYE, UIF & Union Fees all show up in their respective ledgers correctly. (Fine it works out, but I would have rather captured the total PAYE/UIF/Union Fees paid per month for all employees, instead of the effort she went through for each employee separately)

Anyway, so the owner did the books himself from September 2018, and he posted only the Nett Wages paid every week to the respective employee’s wages accounts when recording the bank cashbook. No entries were ever posted to the PAYE, UIF & Union Fees ledgers. On the bright side, he did pay these fees every month, and recorded the payments correctly.

My problem here is, how do I record the PAYE, UIF & Union Fees that are missing? Can I do journals to correct this, and what contra account(s) do I use? Or am I going to have to go back and redo the transactions in the cash books, by reversing them and re-entering them using the same reference numbers as they were done before with the negative payment entries?

Because the employees’ wages’ ledgers also now reflect their Gross Wages every week up until September 2018, thereafter it shows only their Nett Wages. I’m assuming it needs to be the Gross Wages that need to be recorded?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!