When preparing payroll journals in BrightPay, discrepancies between journal entries and payroll reports may occasionally arise. To address these issues systematically, please follow the steps outlined below:

1. Verify Date Range: Ensure that the date range for which you are preparing the journals encompasses the payment dates of the payroll runs under review. For example, if you are preparing journals for the month ending April 30th, and the payroll was had a payment date of May 5th, confirm that the journal date range includes May 5th.

2. Include Individual Employee Records: Select the option to include individual records for each employee within the journal. This feature enables a more detailed examination of specific entries. For instance, you may discover that the discrepancy pertains to an Unpaid Leave deduction for a particular employee. You can then make further adjustments, if required.

3. Adjust Nominal Mapping: If necessary, adjust your default nominal mapping or variations to ensure the journal is generated accurately. This step may involve re-evaluating the allocation of accounts to better align with your payroll structure and chart of accounts. For instance, you can create a variation on the third journal screen for directors salaries.

4. Ensure that figures are rounded to two decimal place: In some circumstances, where figures on the payroll screen have more than two decimal places, this can result in a situation where the total credits do not equal the total credits.

5. Examine variations: Re-examine your nominal ledger mapping variations. If you have set up a variation based on a department, for example, ensure that the departments were defined before that payroll run was finalised.

If the variations are too vague or ordered incorrectly, you may notice negative values on your journal. Have a look at the order of your variations. You can place variations such as variations to directors wages or variations based on department at the top of your list, and more specific variations such as a variation for bonuses towards the bottom of your list of variations.

If you have a variation set up for a pay item like 'Bonus', for example, ensure that the description of this pay item on the payroll screen exactly matches 'Bonus'. In the screenshots below, you will see an example where the 'Bonus' addition description has been edited. The variation set up for 'Bonus' will not pick up this addition.

6. Seek Expert Assistance: Should you encounter persistent difficulties in reconciling your journals, please do not hesitate to contact our payroll support team. Our team are trained to provide comprehensive assistance in situations such as this.

Note: When posting a journal for a single weekly employee in BrightPay (to Xero) and there are multiple pay schedules (e.g., weekly and monthly), BrightPay will include any employee with a pay date that falls within the date range you set for the journal. This includes employees from different pay schedules if their pay date is within that range.

For example, if your journal’s date range is set from 25/04/26 to 01/05/26 and your monthly schedule’s pay date is 30/04/26, BrightPay will pick up all employees (weekly and monthly) whose pay falls within that date range.

How to ensure only the weekly employee is included:

• Adjust both 'from' and 'to' dates in the journal setup so they match exactly the pay date for the weekly period you want to post.
• For example, if your weekly employee’s pay date is 01/05/26, set BOTH 'from' and 'to' fields to 01/05/26. This filters the journal to only that weekly employee/pay schedule.

Special Situation:

• If both weekly and monthly pay schedules happen to share the exact same pay date, the above method isn’t enough. BrightPay can only filter using date ranges and not by pay schedule.
• In this case, you’ll need to re-open (unfinalise) the payslips for the pay schedule you do NOT want included (e.g., monthly employees), then generate and post your journal for the weekly employee(s).
• Afterwards, re-finalise the monthly payslips.

Summary:

• BrightPay picks up any pay data with a pay date inside the journal’s date range.
• To filter, set both 'from' and 'to' dates to your specific pay date.
• If multiple pay schedules share a pay date, temporarily re-open unwanted payslips and re-finalise after posting the journal.