Deleted Payroll - how to delete on Transaction page
bucy99
Member Posts: 1
On any given pay period, I may have one or more Deleted Payrolls due to last-minute modifications as I am processing. The deleted payroll journal entry always shows up on the Transaction page and prior to the upgrade, I would just delete the bad ones and Approve the correct one. Now when I try to delete, the error msg says "The selected transactions can't be modified in bulk."
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Comments
Hey @bucy99! That's definitely an odd one but I'd love to look into this further with you. Can you send a screenshot here of what you're seeing when you attempt to delete that transaction? Feel free to block out any sensitive information before posting here.
hello any updates to this? i see the same thing happening. i deleted a payroll entry but the JE of the transaction is still there and can't be deleted.
Hi @ego! Thanks for reaching out! When you run a Payroll in Wave a subsequent journal transaction is posted to your transactions page that is not able to be deleted. If you delete a Payroll, a corresponding 'reversal' journal transaction will be posted to balance out the original journal transaction. The reason they are not able to be deleted is because they act as a record of the Payroll run.
Hello @EmmaP, thank you for clarifying, would both the deleted and reversal transaction be removed when someone stop using your paid payroll services? if not is there another way of removing those transactions?
Hey @CodeWell! Those transactions will still exist in your Wave account even if someone were to stop using Wave Payroll services. There would be no way to delete these transactions.
I have now run into this issue, and I'm not really sure why these two journal entries wouldn't be able to be deleted.
For the same pay period, before the payroll is actually run (i.e. before payroll funds are removed / transferred):
Is there a reason why journal entry B isn't sufficient for record keeping? Payroll A was never actually run, so the double journal entry for A is just extra noise to contend with on the transaction page - and I'm not sure why the record would need to be maintained given the payroll was never actually run.
If I'm missing a key part of this (which is totally possible) please let me know - but I wanted to add to this chain because it seems like something we should be able to remove from the transaction page given what I described above, so the current functionality is a bit frustrating.
Thanks for any info you can provide - happy to explain further if any of the above doesn't make sense.
Hey @Vijay_HV !
If you delete an approved payroll, a matching journal transaction will be created with the credits and debits reversed, to cancel out the original transaction. The journal transaction will also be tagged as “deleted” for ease of reference. To this necessary to keep accurate records in your account. Below I broke down payroll bookkeeping for some additional insight.
Payroll Bookkeeping
Essentially the initial journaled transaction is categorized under a liability account. So, when a payroll is approved, the liability account is credited (increased) by, the amount that you owe the employees. This is the accounting equivalent of saying “I approved payroll, so now I owe my employees the wages from that payroll”.
Wave will also create a withdrawal transaction in the Transactions page whose account is set to the funding account from Account Mapping, and whose category is set to Payroll Liabilities. The date of this transaction will match the withdrawal date for the Direct Deposit. Where the journal transaction credited Payroll Liabilities, this transaction debits it by the amount of the withdrawal. This is the accounting equivalent of saying “Ok, now I’ve actually paid my employees.”
The triplicate transaction is if you have a bank account connected, it will pull in the same withdrawal transaction, so you would have to either merge the two transactions, or delete the bank-imported transaction, as Wave will have already accounted for it. People recommend merging by selecting the check boxes beside the two withdrawal transactions and selecting merge at the top instead of deleting, but it doesn't exactly matter to be honest. Some people don't like the idea of deleting a transaction.
I'd highly recommend reading about how our payroll services work with this handy article.
Hi @JulianP - thanks for the reply.
I think understand the functionality you outline correctly, but that doesn't address what I was trying to point out. Let me try to better explain my question:
Based on my use of the system, I don't agree it's necessary to keep the double journal entries for accuracy before any money changes accounts (ex. before the first withdrawal date), so why can't an "unprocessed" approved payrolls be deleted?
For instance, assuming A and B are two different "versions" that cover the same payroll period:
1. I approve payroll "A" (No payroll associated money changed in any account)
2. Journal entry "A" created (No payroll associated money changed in any account)
3. I discover a problem with payroll A, and need to make an adjustment (No payroll associated money changed in any account)
4. I delete payroll "A" (No payroll associated money changed in any account)
5. Journal entry "-A" is created (No payroll associated money changed in any account)
6. I approve payroll "B" (No payroll associated money changed in any account)
7. Journal entry "B" is created (No payroll associated money changed in any account)
8. First withdrawal associated with payroll "B" (MONEY HAS NOW CHANGED IN ACCOUNTS)
Why can't journal entry A be deleted in this case, instead of making the "-A"? I don't see any impact to accuracy, given the payroll was approved but no money changed accounts yet.
Maybe there's some other core element I don't understand, or some use case that I'm not considering. Let me reply to your post more specifically, in case that's helpful too:
If you delete an approved payroll, a matching journal transaction will be created with the credits and debits reversed, to cancel out the original transaction. The journal transaction will also be tagged as “deleted” for ease of reference. To this necessary to keep accurate records in your account. Below I broke down payroll bookkeeping for some additional insight.
Currently, the reversed payroll journal entry has "deleted" at the front of the description field, but it's not really "tagged" or easily identified otherwise (and more confusingly, the original journal entry looks like an otherwise normal entry with no indication that it has been deleted - you'd have to find the associated reversed entry to now this journal entry has been revered out).
_ Essentially the initial journaled transaction is categorized under a liability account. So, when a payroll is approved, the liability account is credited (increased) by, the amount that you owe the employees. This is the accounting equivalent of saying “I approved payroll, so now I owe my employees the wages from that payroll”. _
This makes sense overall. But the payroll liability account doesn't actually receive this money. Before any real money moves accounts, if a journal entry is deleted, why can't the liability entries be deleted?
Wave will also create a withdrawal transaction in the Transactions page whose account is set to the funding account from Account Mapping, and whose category is set to Payroll Liabilities. The date of this transaction will match the withdrawal date for the Direct Deposit. Where the journal transaction credited Payroll Liabilities, this transaction debits it by the amount of the withdrawal. This is the accounting equivalent of saying “Ok, now I’ve actually paid my employees.”
I understand this, again generally makes sense. Although, before the actual transaction date this isn't that helpful to me, because I have to keep a separate calculation to accommodate for this pending transaction.
The triplicate transaction is if you have a bank account connected, it will pull in the same withdrawal transaction, so you would have to either merge the two transactions, or delete the bank-imported transaction, as Wave will have already accounted for it. People recommend merging by selecting the check boxes beside the two withdrawal transactions and selecting merge at the top instead of deleting, but it doesn't exactly matter to be honest. Some people don't like the idea of deleting a transaction.
This makes sense, and I understand why technically all these transactions are created, and why it would need to be merged to "clean things up" in the transaction list. No issues with this functionality.
Again, I get that there might be some fundamental element of bookkeeping I'm overlooking, or I might be a unique case (because of the way I happen to keep the books, or because I am a very small business, etc.), but otherwise I'm not sure why it couldn't work as described above, which would be a better experience for me.
I hope all this extra detail helps to better explain my question / understanding. Please let me know what you think - thanks!
Hey there @Vijay_HV !
Since Wave uses accrual based accounting, any journal transactions that have been generated by Wave for payroll or an adjustment cannot be deleted since any transaction that involves real money movement, paid or unpaid, needs to be recorded at all times. If an approved payroll with direct deposits enabled contains an error, you will need to account for this on your next payroll. Alternatively, you can reach out to one of our Payroll Specialists via chat to help you with any necessary adjustments.
If you haven't already, I highly encourage you to check out our Payroll bookkeeping Help Center article.
Hi @JulianP ,
Thanks for following up. I appreciate your additional explanations, and I did read the post you linked to, but I'm still not clear on why what I described wouldn't work in the way I've described (or, at least why the current functionality is the only way). I don't intend to be a stick in the mud on this, I just want to make sure you and the Wave team know that this still doesn't make sense to me (and perhaps might frustrate other users in the same way).
I understand that accrual based accounting should record an entry at the moment of the transaction (vs. when something is paid). But almost all other transactions within Wave I record the same way, I can freely delete or edit at any time. So, in this way, I'm not sure how the accrual method is the blocker here.
In addition, I can edit the amounts within these journal transactions that are auto generated, at any point. For example, I took the original auto-created payroll journal entry, as well as the second one that zeroes it out that was auto-created when I deleted that payroll, and brought all the values down to zero. How is this functionally different than deleting these two journal entries?
Again, I do appreciate you taking the time to respond, I understand this is likely an edge case, and apologize if I'm missing something that is clear to everyone else... but as of now I still don't get why this would have to function the way that it does.
Hey @Vijay_HV , thanks for following up on this.
I think the answer to this lies in the fact that Payroll bookkeeping really can be confusing. Wave was created as a free online bookkeeping software for business owners who may have never done bookkeeping in their life and we believe that that time should be spent running their business. For that reason, we try to make the bookkeeping process as streamlined as possible.
When it comes to Payroll, we've created a bookkeeping process that functions on its own without the need of additional calculations or intervention, thus saving time and effort for our users. Are there cases where users need to make adjustments because our processes don't work for them? Of course, which is why we allow you to edit the journal transactions if need be. The reason that they can't be deleted however is because far too often users do mistakingly delete transactions that are vital for bookkeeping calculations. We use a similar automated process for our Payments bookkeeping transactions and because half of the process relies on bank imported transactions (which can be deleted), unfortunately these are often accidentally removed by users who end up reaching out to Wave support to learn how to re-add them.
We know that the JT that we create for Payroll isn't necessarily simple, especially for those that are new to bookkeeping, so we try to minimize the possible impact that you could have by deleting it. With that being said, there are always options for those very small subset of users who do need to edit the journal or need to create another one to cancel out the original, giving all of our users the option to track their bookkeeping the way that they need to.