BalRec

BalRec allows an organisation to demonstrate that the statutory balances held within their Oracle HRMS system reconcile correctly and thereby be confident that their submissions to HM Revenue & Customs are accurate.

BalRec is used to ensure that an organisation can reconcile their Oracle HRMS payroll system to their General Ledger well in advance of reaching the financial year end and subsequent filing to HM Revenue & Customs. It compares statutory balances between the P35, General Ledger and Gross to Net values, highlighting any issues requiring investigation.

It extracts datasets directly from the payroll system and compares these to one another to ensure that they all reconcile to the penny. These extracts are usually the statutory balances accumulated after a payroll has completed, the Gross to Net figures, the P35 data (utilising the actual report produced by the system) and the data used to post to the General Ledger.

A clear user interface displays differences between the datasets and provides the information required to identify the source of any issues. It is possible to drill down from summary level to individual employee to facilitate issue investigation and resolution.

Egress recommends that an organisation fully reconciles its payroll each month to ensure that no unexpected issues appear at financial year end; a period when human resource requirements are typically at their peak. Egress also recognises the importance of ensuring employee and statutory data is consistent and accurate. BalRec provides the necessary comfort that year end reporting is fulfilled with the minimum of manual effort.

Typical scenario

Most organisations, in particular those with a non integrated General Ledger system, perform a number of stages following their payroll runs to, in effect, “complete” the payroll cycle. These may include verifying the payroll run, to produce a cumulative P35 report and to post the payments to the General Ledger.

In the case of Oracle HRMS, there are a number of functions that exist that may cause difficulties during reconciliations. For example, a payroll clerk may run a Quickpay on an individual and forget to roll this back prior to running the costing job that produces the General Ledger files. The clerk may then realise their error and rollback the Quickpay, however by then it is too late and the payment would have been posted to the ledger, resulting in a mismatch between the statutory balances and the General Ledger.

Significantly, it is manual adjustments incorrectly performed against an employee’s payroll data that cause the majority of anomalies.  With BalRec these can be identified in the month they’re made; without it the incorrect values may not be identified until reports are submitted to and analysed by HM Revenue & Customs, which may result in a fine being levied.