Explain a salary payment to an employee
This article describes how to explain a salary payment that has been paid out of your business bank account to an employee, or a director of the company who is also an employee.
Once the relevant bank transaction has been imported into your FreeAgent account via a bank feed or uploaded from a bank statement, you will need to explain it using the appropriate ‘Type’ and ‘Category’ as detailed below.
Please note:
- The steps below only apply if you're running payroll or creating payroll journals in FreeAgent. If you're not recording payroll in FreeAgent, you would explain the bank transaction as a 'Net Salary Expense'.
- You'll need to have level 6 access or above to your FreeAgent account to explain bank transactions.
- The employee who will be receiving the salary payment will also need to be added as a user in FreeAgent.
Explaining the money paid out of your bank account
Navigate to the relevant bank transaction and select ‘Money Paid to User’ from the transaction ‘Type’ drop-down menu. Please note that this option will only be available for business bank accounts. You won’t see this option if the bank account has been marked as personal or for a user who has been allocated the role of ‘Accountant’.
Select the relevant employee from the ‘Payment to’ drop-down menu.
Select ‘Net Salary and Bonuses’ from the ‘Category’ drop-down menu.
Select ‘Explain Transaction’ to complete the process.
If the salary payment is for more than one employee, you will need to split the bank transaction to allocate the appropriate amount to each employee.
If you have more than one transaction that you need to explain as a salary payment to the same employee, tick the checkboxes to the left of the relevant transactions and select ‘Money Paid to User’ from the ‘Type’ drop-down menu in the panel on the right-hand side.
Select the relevant employee from the ‘Payment to’ drop-down menu, select ‘Net Salary and Bonuses’ from the ‘Category’ drop-down menu and select ‘Explain [X] transactions’ to explain all the selected transactions in the same way. Remember to include an appropriate description for the selected transactions. If you leave the ‘description’ field blank, the transactions will be given the original descriptions that came through for them via the bank feed import or bank statement upload.
For more information on explaining multiple transactions at once, please see this article.
What happens next?
The transaction(s) will appear in the employee’s salary account in FreeAgent.
Navigate to the 'My Money' tab at the top of the screen and select 'Salary' from the drop-down menu.
Select the relevant employee and time period using the drop-down menus. The transaction(s) will appear under the ‘Paid’ column and will reduce the amount owed to the employee in the ‘Balance Owed’ column. The amount owed to the employee from their payslips will appear in the ‘Owed’ column.