Creating a test journal for PSF

The posting of a journal from PS People into PS Financials consists of 2 separate processes.

  1. Preparing the journal data.

This is performed within the PS People software and it reviews all of the necessary analysis combinations, including all of the associated on-costs such as the Employer’s NI and Pension contributions. As part of this process, PS People will determine the analysis codes which are going to be used and verifies each of them against the PSF Nominal and Cost Centre structure. It does this via a series of mappings but ultimately PSF will either accept or reject the proposed code combination.

If a code is rejected it will be referred to the Suspense Account and this is why the Suspense Account List and Wages Control Account Errors reports should both be empty prior to the Period End process being attempted. The options in the “Financial Analysis” folder of the Payroll Reports menu perform the same journal data preparation process as the Period End, prior to the journal being “posted”.

2. Posting the journal data.

Once the data has been “prepared” the DTT (Data Transformation Tool) software element of the PSF system is “informed” of the proposed journal, referenced by a unique PS People Batch Number, and it (the DTT) will then reach back into PS People, extract the prepared journal data and perform the actual posting into PSF.

This is typically all done silently as part of the PS People Period End process, but it can also be performed as a separate function in the “Financial Analysis” option of the Payroll / Enquiries menu.

At the very beginning of an implementation of PS People it is advisable to test the DTT journal posting process to ensure that this software element has been installed and appropriately configured to perform these journals. PS People includes a facility which simply posts a £1 journal into and then immediately out of, the Bank Account (Net Pay) described on the Payroll module parameters. Although this is only a 2 entry journal with a net effect of zero, it should be visible within PSF and subsequently confirm that the posting process is configured and prepared for a more comprehensive journal at a later date.

In order to create a test journal in PSF please follow these steps.

1. Review the “Financial Control Accounts” option on the Payroll / Definitions / Module Setup menu.

The Control Accounts (Balance Sheet) are typically described against each Company (Organisation)  in PS People but you can also describe Balance Sheet accounts for each Payroll Template, if you have more than 1.

Press the “Display” button to review the existing entries.

These entries will be in the following format:

Net Pay : ???-BSHEET-NET-

PAYE : ???-BSHEET-PAYENI-

and so on.

In this scenario, when each sub-journal is prepared for each employee, the ??? is replaced by the 3 digit location code of the employee being processed. You can adjust these accounts to be specific to a centralised location in which case the P&L analysis will be specific to the employee’s location but the Balance Sheet postings will be to a centralised location, for all employees.

For the purposes of the test journal, you will need to adjust the “Net Pay” account to be a centralised location such as:  ABC-BSHEET-NET-  Alternatively you can briefly change this to be any valid Location/Nominal/Cost Centre combination to be used for this isolated test.

If the proposed code combination is accepted by PSF an appropriate description will be displayed in the adjacent text box.

Select “Save” and then “Close”

2. Post the test journal. Payroll / Enquiries / Financial Analysis.

Select “Test”

You will be presented with 2 confirmation screens. The first will display the command that is about to be executed. If this process fails, this may be of assistance to the technical support team when they investigate this on your behalf.

The second confirmation screen is a simple, last chance Yes/No option, before the command is then executed.

At this stage, you may not witness any activity but this does not mean that the journal has not been successful.

Please follow the stages described in the following link Reviewing PSP(Y) Journals in PSF to see if the journal is resident in PSF. If it is not, then please contact the support desk for assistance.

Once you have confirmed or otherwise, that the journal has been posted, please remember to reset the Net Pay Balance Sheet account amended in the first step of this process.

Simply change it back to how it was previously , namely,  ???-BSHEET-NET-