The Payroll Import feature of Shepherd's Staff provides a way to import payroll files from four different providers (Payroll Mate, Pay Window, Paychex and Paycor) to quickly and easily generate your payroll transactions for each of your employees. Generating the payroll file from each of their software will vary slightly, and the file types exported will differ between them. Payroll Mate will export as a XLS file, Pay Window as a CSV, and Paychex and Paycor will export out as either an XLSX, XLS or a TXT file. Once you have your payroll file from your software, you can follow the steps below to import this file into Shepherd's Staff.
Note: As of the time of this writing, ZPay, the company who manages Pay Window has announced that after 40 years of providing payroll software, the company will be shutting down as of 12/31/2023. For more information, you can visit ZPay's website, which is linked here.
- In Finance, click on the "Activity" tab, and then click on "Payroll import" on the left side of the window.
- At the top of the Payroll import window, select which Book/Fund you are importing these transactions into in the "Book" or "Fund" field.
- In the "Payroll format" field, select which software you are going to be importing your payroll file from.
- In the "Pay Bank Account" field, select which bank (asset) account you will be used in your transactions.
- In the "Mark payments as:" field, select if you want the transactions the import utility creates to be marked as "Paid" or "Pending" by clicking the radio button of the option you want. If you will be printing checks from Shepherd's Staff, you'll want them to be Pending. If your payroll software provider generates the actual payments and you just need them recorded in Shepherd's Staff, mark them as Paid.
- To the right of the "Payroll Import File" field, click the "Browse" option, and a file explorer window will appear. Navigate to where you saved your payroll file from your payroll software, and once you've found it, double click it.
- Click the "Import Payroll File" button. You'll receive a message letting you know if your file imported successfully or not.
- Next, click on the "Account Xref Setup" button. You will be told how many Account Xref (cross reference) records were created. Click OK, and you will be brought to the "Account Xref" window. Here, you will see each account that has a line item on your payroll file, what account type that line item is, and then, in the "Matching Account in Shepherd's Staff" field, you will select which account in Shepherd's Staff matches up with the line item on your payroll file.
- You can select the account by clicking on the line item, and then click the "Edit" button at the bottom of the grid. A window will appear with a "Select Account" drop list. You can select any account that matches the Account type in the "Account type" column for that line item. If you are importing from Paycor, Payroll Mate or Pay Window you can also select an offset account for the line item you are importing to. For Paycor and Payroll Mate, you can also decide if a line item will appear on an employee's pay stub. For employer portions of deductions, you would want to make sure to hide those from an employee's pay stub. This will use the offset accounts where set to create a Journal Entry add those employer expenses into a liability account so they can be paid out in a later transaction, so you will typically only need to add offsets for expense accounts for employer portions of taxes. Depending on your payroll file, this may or may not be needed. Click the "Close" button at the bottom left of the grid to close the "Account Xref" window. NOTE: this data will be saved, so you won't have to map the same accounts every time.
- After you have mapped out your accounts, you will need to do the same with your vendors. Click the "Vendor Xref Setup" button. You'll be told how many Vendor Xref (cross reference) records were created. Click OK, and you will be brought to the "Vendor Xref" window. Here, you will see each vendor from your payroll file. In the "Matching Vendor in Shepherd's Staff" field, you will select the vendor in Shepherd's Staff that matches with vendor you see in the "Vendor from Import File" field. To select the vendor, click on the line you want to set the vendor on, and then click "Edit" at the bottom of the grid. In the window that appears, click the droplist for the "Select Vendor" field, and pick the vendor you want to select for this line, and then click the "Save" button. When finished, click the "Close" button in the bottom left corner of the grid. NOTE: this data will be saved, so you won't have to map the same vendors every time.
- Click the "Create Payments and Journal Entries" button, and this will create the transactions from your payroll file.