Note: This applies if you offer group benefits to your employees. This is one common way we see clients set up Journal Entries for group benefits. Your chart of accounts and setup may differ, so check with your accountant or bookkeeper before you post them.

On pay runs, Rise normally invoices and withdraws three things from your account:

• Net pay
• Government remittances (both the employee and employer portions)
• Rise service fees

If you offer employee group benefits, the premium deductions are calculated in the pay run but are not part of that invoice. The premiums are billed separately, on their own invoice: from Rise for Rise Health, or from your carrier for other plans.

Since most clients want the journal entry report to match the pay run invoice to the penny, they usually choose not to map the premium deductions or employer-paid benefits to a payable or an expense in Rise Journal Entry.

Instead, they record the premium as its own journal entry in their accounting system when the group benefits invoice arrives.

To illustrate this common setup, let's look at an example of a single employee who earns $1,000 in gross salary with a $50 health benefit deduction, and where the employer also pays $100 toward the premium.

Entry 1: Your Rise Journal Entry (the pay run)

Rise Journal Entry maps your payroll instructions to the accounts in your accounting system or ERP. After a pay run, you can pull a report of the journal entries or post them straight to QuickBooks Online or Xero through the integration.

Since most companies split commission, bonuses, severance, and other earnings across different GL accounts, we've built the Journal Entry feature to map each earning code to the correct GL codes individually. This means the report will debit wages expense accounts and credit cash or payroll clearing accounts — for the full GROSS amount of the earnings.

For example, for the Reg. Salary Pay (gross amount), you might map the earning like this:

The catch with group benefits is that Rise doesn't actually withdraw $1,000 in cash in this pay run, and your employees aren't getting $1,000 in wages. We haven't accounted for the $50 group benefits deduction.

Because Rise doesn't withdraw it on the pay run, you have to exclude it from both wages and cash to balance the invoice. To do this, map the deduction the opposite way, to debit cash and credit wages:

Together, these two mappings net to $950 of wages and a $950 cash withdrawal, which matches the $950 Rise actually took out.

What about the employer portion of the premium?

Since the employer portion is not part of the invoice and has no impact on cash as part of the pay run, this payroll instruction doesn't need to be mapped — you can ignore it.

Entry 2: The benefits premium invoice

Separately from payroll, you'll get an invoice for the total premiums from your insurance carrier: the employee deductions plus the employer-paid share. When you do, you'll need to record it yourself as a separate journal entry in your accounting system or ERP.

In our example, the invoice totals $150: the $50 withheld from the employee plus the $100 the employer pays. Record the full premium as a benefits expense:

If you'd rather record the bill before you pay it, credit a benefits payable account instead of cash, then clear the payable when the payment leaves your account.

Note: This premium entry is not part of your Rise Journal Entry. Enter it in your accounting system when you receive the premium invoice.