Together let’s look at Sage payroll and the nominal link.
For those who don’t already know, the nominal link will allow you to send information from your payroll system through to your sage 50 or your sage 200 accounting systems. It makes your life so much easier.
How many of you have to post that journal at the end of the week, or the end of the month from your payroll through to your main accounts?
How long does it take you?
A client of mine recently told me that it takes them nearly a whole day just to sort out their payroll journal. This is purely because they have a lot of cost centers, and a lot of departments to deal with. Each of these take a long time to work out where everything has to be posted.
After talking, we decided that what we needed to do was to set up what’s called ‘the nominal link’ for them. This means that, yes we’ve had to do that journal, and it’s taken fair few hours to work it through, but we’ve only had to do it just the once.
What the link will then allow it to do is the next time they run payroll, they can press the button that says ‘nominal link’, and then simply follow a few next buttons, and it will then post directly to the journal.
They have the opportunity to review the journal as it is going along, to make sure everything is going where they want it to, if needs be. Or they can just simply post it directly.
You can also post it as a group transaction, so you just get subtotals for everything you want from your PAYE, your NI, your wages control account and the like. Or you can have individual transactions. (Not many people want all the individual lines of all their payroll in their main accounting systems, so it depends on what you need for your business.)
It’s quite straight forward to set up, and it’s done through your company button, and in your nominal link settings. There you will find a page that says profit and loss, and a second page that says balance sheet. Simply type in the nominal codes that you want it to go to.
You have the ability to have overrides for any different payment types. So if you’ve got people who are on salary or overtime, basic pay or any second payments, and also considers things like if they’re on something like first-aider allowance, or a fire marshal allowance, then you might want that to post to a different nominal code to the main payments. All of these are available as options and can easily be done.
You’ve also got overrides of payments, the deductions, cost centres and departments.
These will link through to your main accounts.
Within Sage payroll itself, you have on every employees tabs, a tab that says analysis. This then has cost centers and departments. These are not linked to your cost centers and departments in your sage 50 or sage 200 – they are completely independent. They can be the same, but they don’t have to be. It’s just a way that you can group your employees together so they can be treated the same.
You can get reports for things from these analysis fields too.
Don’t however get them confused with the ones for your nominal codes.
I know this will save you both time, money and effort by posting these journals automatically rather than you having to manually key them in each time.
I hope this has been helpful.
If I can be of any more assistance, please do give me a call, I’m always pleased to hear from you.