The General Ledger Accounts area of Netchex Payroll controls how payroll dollars are categorized when they flow into your accounting system. Across this series you'll learn how to view and add base accounts, map earnings, deductions, and taxes to the right accounts, manage company-level cash and suspense accounts, and use the multidimensional grid for department-level reporting.

Where to find it

Everything lives under Maintenance → Payroll. Scroll down until you see the General Ledger Accounts heading.

The four groups

• Base General Ledger Accounts — a base GL account is the default accounting line used for payroll earnings, deductions, and taxes when generating payroll GL reports. Here you can download a report of all base accounts, pull a report showing where each account is mapped, and edit base accounts.
• Manage Expense and Payable Accounts — where you map your deductions, earnings, and taxes to base general ledger accounts.
• Manage Company Accounts — where you manage the mapping of cash, suspense, and other expense accounts.
• Multidimensional General Ledger Accounts — where you edit your multidimensional general ledger (including for client projects) and generate a report of your current mappings.

The Base General Ledger Accounts screen is your chart of accounts inside Netchex — an organized list of every account your business uses to track money coming in, going out, and everything in between. It's the foundation all of your financial reporting is built on, so getting it set up correctly matters.

Three attributes per account

Every account is built from an account number, a description, and an account type. Account types include categories like current asset, salary expense, employer expense, or employer liability. These types tell the system — and your accounting team — where each account belongs on your financial statements: assets and liabilities typically appear on your balance sheet, while expenses appear on your income statement. You don't need to be an accountant to work here, but understanding that distinction helps the choices make sense.

Think of this list as the master record that every other mapping screen refers back to. When you map earnings, deductions, and taxes later, all of those mappings point back to the accounts you set up here.

Adding an account

Click Add in the top right, enter the account number (many organizations follow a convention like assets in the 100s and expenses in the 500s or 600s, though Netchex doesn't require a specific structure), give it a clear description so anyone reading your reports later can tell what it's for, then select the account type. Once you save, the account is immediately available across every mapping screen.

Editing, locking & deleting

Opening an existing account works a little differently: once an account is in use, only the description can be edited — the account number and account type are locked. This is intentional, since changing them after they've been used in mappings and reports could create inconsistencies in your historical data. And if you try to delete an account that's already assigned elsewhere, Netchex will stop you and ask you to unassign it first.

Two reports worth knowing

Right next to the list are the Base General Ledger Chart of Accounts Report and the Base General Ledger Mappings Report. Both export your account setup in PDF or Excel — especially useful when your finance team or outside accountant wants to review your structure without logging into Netchex.

Manage Expense and Payable Accounts is where you connect the payroll items you process every pay run to the base accounts you set up earlier. This is the heart of GL mapping — where payroll data starts turning into the debits and credits your accounting team works with.

Map Earnings

Every earning code — regular, overtime, bonus, and so on — needs to be tied to an expense account so it shows up correctly on your GL transactions report. Any item marked unmapped in red hasn't been assigned yet — that's your punch list. Turn on the Show Only Unmapped checkbox to filter out everything already set up and zero in on what still needs an account.

Map Deductions

Deductions work the same basic way, with one twist: two tabs, Employer Paid and Employee Paid, because deductions can hit your books from both sides. And unlike earnings, each deduction needs two accounts — an expense account and a liability account. That's because a deduction typically represents money withheld or incurred but not yet paid out (for example, health insurance premiums sit in a liability account until they're remitted to the carrier). An Include in GL Report toggle controls whether a deduction appears in your GL output — worth double-checking for anything finance expects to see.

Map Taxes

Taxes follow the same pattern — Employer Paid and Employee Paid tabs, each mapped to both an expense and a liability account — because taxes are often withheld or accrued before they're paid to the taxing agency, and the liability account tracks what's owed in the meantime.

Two consistent tools

On all three pages you'll see an Add GL Account button (create a new base account on the fly without leaving the mapping screen) and a history button (shows exactly who changed a mapping and when — a useful audit trail). One flag for new admins: if payroll is currently processing, a yellow banner notes that GL mappings can't be modified until the run completes. A grayed-out dropdown isn't an error — it just means you need to wait.

Manage Company Accounts

• Map Cash Accounts — map any Netchex fees on your payroll invoice, plus paper checks, HSA and direct deposits, taxes, benefits, and third-party direct deposits. Use the Description Override field for a custom label.
• Map Suspense Accounts — suspense accounts are where items like premium pay, direct deposits, taxes, or benefits post if the payroll detail register and the payroll invoice don't match (usually from voids, or tax changes between the payroll date and invoice date). It's a temporary landing spot until the discrepancy is resolved.
• Map Other Expense Accounts — miscellaneous items that don't fit earnings, deductions, or taxes, most commonly payroll processing fees.

So far we've mapped payroll items to a single set of GL accounts. But if you need to see costs broken down by department, client, or project — not just by account type — that's where Multidimensional General Ledger Accounts comes in. Your earnings, deductions, and taxes being mapped already is the foundation everything else builds on.

If your GL is not department-based

It's simple: select the appropriate GL code from the dropdown for each earning, deduction, or tax. If the code you need isn't listed, click Add GL Account to create it on the spot.

If your GL is department-based

This is most common with earnings, and it works a little differently. Instead of mapping each earning directly to its final department-specific account, you first choose a base account — the general category an earning belongs to, regardless of department. Several earning codes might all map to the same base account (like salary/wages expense) because they represent the same type of cost, even though the actual GL code ultimately differs by department. Again, Add GL Account if none fits.

Building the grid

From the General Ledger Accounts menu, open Edit Multidimensional General Ledger Accounts. Select the department(s) you want to map, then select each base account that needs to be split out by department, and click Build Grid. Netchex generates a grid combining every department-and-base-account pairing. Click into each cell and enter the appropriate GL code for that earning type and department. The header row always shows which base account description you're working with, so you're never guessing. When every cell is filled, click Save Changes.

Mapping by client project

The process follows the same logic. Select your base GL accounts and departments as before, but this time also select a project, choose the department associated with that project, and click Build Grid. You get a combined view of base accounts, departments, and projects so you can map GL codes down to the project level with the same grid-and-cell process.

Verifying your work

After saving, confirm everything works: go to Reports → Payroll → General Ledger Transactions, adjust the settings, and click Submit. This shows exactly how your payroll costs flow through to each department- or project-specific account. Netchex also offers a dedicated Multidimensional General Ledger Chart of Accounts report — a standalone view of every account, department, and project combination you've built, independent of a payroll run — ideal for auditing your setup and catching gaps or duplicates.

Even with your general ledger fully mapped, you'll occasionally open a report that doesn't look quite right. The good news: almost every common GL issue in Netchex comes down to one of a few root causes, and once you know what to look for, they're usually quick to resolve.

Reading the General Ledger Transactions report

This report displays your income, expenses, and cost allocations by department. Once your account numbers in Netchex match the numbers in your accounting software, you can post that payroll information straight to your books. Keep in mind it shows aggregate company totals — it does not break costs down by individual employee (that's what the multidimensional setup is for).

The report is split into four sections, and understanding them is the key to troubleshooting:

• Salary expense — wages; always a debit balance.
• Employer expense — employer taxes and deduction expenses; also a debit.
• Employer liability — the employer payable portion of taxes or deductions; a credit.
• Tax liability — taxes; a credit.

Rule of thumb: expenses debit, liabilities credit. If a number looks off, first check whether it landed in the section and balance type you'd expect. Every paycheck generates several entries — wage expense (debit), tax expense (debit), employer contributions to deductions (debit), employee deductions including withholdings (credit under employer liability), and net pay (credit to your cash account under Settle Net Pay).

Issue 1: a suspense account entry

The most common (and most confusing) thing admins see is an entry labeled something like "Update suspense account, see invoice." That means one of two things: either an expense or liability isn't mapped to a GL account yet, or there's a variance between the payroll detail register and the invoice. Netchex intentionally routes these amounts into a suspense account so they don't get missed. The fix depends on the cause: if something is unmapped, map it using the mapping screens; if it's a variance, you'll typically resolve it with a manual adjusting journal entry in your accounting software.

Issue 2: department totals don't match

Another common surprise: department totals on the Payroll Detail Register don't match department totals on the General Ledger Transactions report, even from the same payroll. This is expected, not an error — the two allocate wages differently. The Detail Register allocates by an employee's home department (from their demographics page); the GL Transactions report allocates by your labor distribution setup, which may split time or cost across multiple departments based on where they actually worked. To reconcile department-level totals, use the Labor Distribution Detail Report (same allocation logic as your GL) — find it via the global search bar.

This lesson looks at how Netchex sends general ledger data over to QuickBooks — and, just as importantly, what to do when something doesn’t go through the way you expect. (Not every company uses QuickBooks, so this session is optional and isn’t covered on the certification quiz.)

How the sync works

When you send your general ledger transactions to QuickBooks Online, Netchex sends those journal entries over via API and matches them up on either account number or account description — whichever method you selected for your account mapping. Before anything is sent, Netchex checks that those account numbers or descriptions actually match what’s already set up in QuickBooks Online. If something doesn’t line up, Netchex gives you an error telling you exactly what didn’t match, so you can fix it before trying again.

The three most common errors — and how to fix them

• An account exists in Netchex but not yet in QuickBooks Online. This is the most common one. Netchex won’t fail silently — it tells you specifically which accounts are missing on the QuickBooks side. Add the missing account in QuickBooks Online, then come back to Netchex and resend your general ledger. No need to start over.
• Unmapped earnings, taxes, or deductions in Netchex. If any of these are left unmapped, they can’t flow through, because there’s no destination account for that information to land in. A single unmapped item can hold up an entire transmission — a good reminder to keep your GL mapping complete and up to date.
• A general ledger that’s out of balance. If your debits and credits don’t match, Netchex will not send the data to QuickBooks Online — which is a good thing, since it prevents bad data from making it into your books. Go back through your mapping, confirm every account is properly assigned, and once everything is mapped and balanced you’ll be able to send successfully.

File formats: Desktop vs. Online

The Netchex General Ledger report outputs in an IIF file format, and the right import path depends on your version of QuickBooks:

• QuickBooks Desktop — IIF is natively compatible, so you can import the file directly with no extra steps.
• QuickBooks Online — doesn’t accept IIF files the same way. Netchex’s sales development team recommends a third-party tool called Transaction Pro to bridge the gap: it converts the same GL file and imports it into QuickBooks Online as a CSV. Transaction Pro also has a helpful support site that walks through the import step by step.

One note on cost: Transaction Pro’s pricing is set by Transaction Pro directly, not by Netchex, so it’s subject to change — check their site for current pricing before you commit.