Payroll is usually the largest expense a service business has. Omnyra lets you type it in, so you do not need a payroll provider connected to get it on your books.
Find it at Accounting → Payroll.
This is the accounting record: what payroll did to your books. It is a different screen from Payroll under the main menu, which lists the people you pay and the pay runs pulled from a connected payroll provider. If you have no provider connected, this screen is where payroll gets recorded, and you do not need one.
The number most owners get wrong
What left your bank is not what your people cost you.
Say you run a $5,000 payroll and withhold $1,200 in tax. Your employees receive $3,800, and that is the figure on your bank statement. But you spent $5,000 on wages. The $1,200 is money you owe the tax authority, and you are holding it for them until it is due.
Then add your own share. Employer payroll tax and any benefits you pay are a cost on top of gross pay, never withheld from anybody. If that is $450, this payroll cost you $5,450.
The screen leads with cost to you for this reason. Price your jobs off the $5,450, not the $3,800, or you will price work below what it costs to do.
Entering a run
Add a person, then enter their gross pay and what was withheld. Take-home is worked out for you and cannot be typed. A take-home figure that disagrees with gross less withholding is an unbalanced payroll, and it would turn up as a discrepancy in your books months later.
The columns:
- Gross — what they earned before anything came out.
- Tax withheld and Other deductions — held back from their pay. Yours to remit, not to keep.
- Your payroll tax and Your benefits — what you pay on top. Never withheld from them.
Tick 1099 for a contractor. Nothing is withheld and you owe no employer tax on them, so those columns switch off. Their pay is contract labor rather than wages.
Drafts and posting
A new run can be saved as a draft. A draft is payroll that has not been run: no expense, no liability, nothing in your reports.
Post to the books is what makes it real. It records the wages, your employer costs, the cash leaving, and the tax you are now holding.
A posted run cannot be edited. If it needs correcting, unpost it first, which takes it back to draft and out of your books until you post it again.
Matching to your bank
The payroll you record and the withdrawal from your bank are two records of one event. Until they are matched, cash-basis reporting counts it from both.
Open a posted run and use Match to bank. Runs that still need matching are flagged in the list.
If you have no bank connection, nothing needs matching.
Payroll tax you are holding
The Payroll tax tab shows what you have withheld and owe, what you have already paid over, and what is still being held.
Watch that last number. It sits in your business bank account looking like your money right up until the day it is due.
Paying it over is not an expense
When you send the withheld tax to the IRS or your state, record it here. It settles what you owe and records the money leaving.
It does not record a second expense. The cost went on your books the day you ran payroll. Recording it again when you pay it counts the same money twice and overstates your payroll for the year by everything you remitted. This is the most common payroll bookkeeping error there is.
What the numbers do
Posting a $5,000 payroll with $1,200 withheld and $450 of employer tax:
- Payroll expense goes up by $5,000. Not $3,800 — the withholding was still your money spent.
- Payroll taxes go up by $450, your own share.
- Cash goes down by $3,800, which is what your people received.
- Payroll liabilities go up by $1,650, being the $1,200 withheld plus your $450.
Later, paying $1,650 to the tax authority reduces cash and clears the liability. No new expense.
By person
The By person tab totals a year for each person you paid, from posted runs only. It shows their gross, their take-home, and what they cost you all in.
People are grouped by name, so somebody paid before they had an employee record is not split across two rows.
Who can see it
Payroll is gated more tightly than the rest of accounting. What one person is paid is the most sensitive figure in a small business, so seeing payroll requires the same permission as seeing officer compensation, not the one that covers bank transactions.
Individual names never appear in the general ledger either. Payroll shows there as totals by department, and the detail stays on this screen.