Payroll inputs for accountants: one export instead of five spreadsheets

What the accountant actually needs every month

Strip away the back-and-forth and the monthly payroll input is a short list:

• Who is on this month's payroll — including the person who joined on the 20th and the person whose last day was the 10th. Both get partial pay; both are the easiest rows to miss.
• Current gross compensation per person — whatever was in effect this month, not last quarter's copy.
• Approved leave days that fall inside the month — unpaid leave changes the pay directly; in several countries sick days change who pays which part.
• Hours for anyone paid hourly — actual worked hours, from a source that won't be edited after payroll runs.
• Approved-but-unpaid reimbursements — the expense money the company owes on top of salary.
• Honest flags on anything incomplete — a missing figure the accountant knows about is a question; one they don't is a wrong payslip.

It isn't much. But it has to be right, complete, and delivered without a chase — and that's where most handoffs fall apart.

Why the HR-to-accountant handoff usually fails

The problem is rarely the accountant and rarely the math. It's that the six inputs live in six places:

• Data is scattered. Salaries in one spreadsheet, time off in a calendar (or worse, in DMs), hours in a tracker, expenses in a chat thread, contract dates in a folder. Someone re-assembles the picture every month.
• Copies drift. The accountant works from "payroll_final_v3.xlsx" while HR has quietly fixed a salary in v4. Version drift between two spreadsheets is invisible until a payslip is wrong.
• The month boundary eats items. An expense incurred on June 28 but approved on July 2 belongs to a June batch that already ran. In a manual process it's simply never paid — nobody's job is to notice.
• Answers live in DMs. "Was Maria's leave approved?" gets answered in chat, and the chat becomes the only record. Next month, the same questions, again.

The fix isn't discipline — it's making one system the source and generating the handoff from it.

The monthly ritual: readiness first, then one export

With the inputs living where the work happens — the directory holds comp and contract dates, time off holds approved leave, timesheets hold locked hours, expenses hold approved reimbursements — the month-end handoff collapses to minutes:

1. Pick the month. The run assembles itself from the live records: everyone employed at any point in the month, including mid-month joiners and leavers.
2. Read the summary. Headcount, consolidated gross, total reimbursements, leave days and approved hours — a sanity check before anything is sent.
3. Clear the readiness flags. Fix what's fixable (lock a timesheet, add a missing salary) or note what the accountant must know.
4. Download one CSV and send it. One file, one version, generated from the same records the team uses daily — so it can't disagree with them.

The ritual matters as much as the tool: same day each month, readiness before export, export before questions. Accountants price predictability.

Readiness checks before the run

A wrong payroll input is worse than a late one. Before the export goes anywhere, four questions need answers:

• Does anyone have no salary on file? A new hire whose comp was never entered will silently vanish from gross totals. Better a loud flag than a quiet zero.
• Do billable people have zero approved hours? That almost never means "didn't work" — it means timesheets weren't filled or weren't locked.
• Who joined this month? First month is usually partial — the accountant needs the hire date to prorate.
• Who is leaving this month? Final pay is its own procedure in most jurisdictions — last working day, unused-leave settlement. Leavers must be in the batch, flagged, not dropped because they're "no longer active".

Alongside the flags, a month view of who was out and when — with the leave type visible — lets the accountant resolve the leave questions themselves instead of asking HR one by one.

What's in the export — and what deliberately isn't

One row per person, one file for the month. Per employee: name and title, a billable flag, annual and monthly gross with its currency, approved leave days, approved (locked) timesheet hours, hire and termination dates, and any approved-but-unpaid reimbursement with its currency.

The details carry the honesty:

• Leave days are working days, holiday-aware — a request spanning a public holiday charges the same number of days payroll sees, so the quota math and the pay math can't diverge.
• Hours are locked hours only. Same review-then-lock logic as client invoicing: what's still editable isn't payable.
• Reimbursements never fall between months. The export carries everything approved-but-unpaid to date — the June 28 expense approved July 2 simply rides into July's batch, and drops out once marked paid.
• Partial figures are labelled. If a reimbursement couldn't be fully converted (a missing FX rate on a multi-currency month), the row says so explicitly — a partial total must never masquerade as complete.

And what it deliberately isn't: a payroll engine. No tax math, no net pay, no proration — those belong to the accountant and their local rules. It's the input feed, not the accountant.

How Helia HR does this

The payroll-input export ships in Helia Base (see pricing) — it's part of the core, not an add-on:

• A payroll page per month — pick year and month; the batch builds from live records: active people, people on leave, and anyone terminated inside the month (they worked part of it — final pay).
• A run summary up top — headcount split billable/overhead, gross consolidated to your reporting currency, reimbursements total, leave days and approved hours, with explicit flags when an FX rate is missing rather than a quietly wrong total.
• Readiness checks before you export — people with no compensation on file, billable people with zero locked hours, joiners to prorate, leavers to settle. All clear reads as a quiet confirmation, not noise.
• A month absence grid — who was out, when, and with what leave type, so the accountant's leave questions answer themselves.
• One-click CSV — the columns above, in English by design so it drops into any accountant's tooling.
• The same records everywhere — the leave days come from the same time-off system that charged the quota, the hours from locked timesheets, the reimbursements from the expenses queue. One source, so the numbers agree by construction.

FAQ

Is this a payroll engine?

No, deliberately. It computes no tax, no net pay, no proration — jurisdictions differ and accountants already have that machinery. It replaces the data-gathering half of payroll: the part that was five spreadsheets and twenty questions.

Why do only locked timesheet hours count?

Because unlocked hours are still editable. If draft hours fed payroll, the numbers could change after the run — the same reason invoices bill only locked hours.

What happens when someone has no salary on file?

The readiness panel flags it and the gross totals exclude the person rather than fabricate a figure. Add the compensation record and the batch rebuilds from live data.

How are multi-currency reimbursements handled?

A single-currency month stays in its native currency. A mixed month is consolidated to your reporting currency — and if a rate is missing, the amount is flagged as partial in both the page and the CSV, never silently understated.

Can the accountant get access directly?

Payroll data sits behind the strictest gate (admin or owner), because it reads compensation. Many teams invite the accountant with that access; others export the CSV monthly. Both are one person's five minutes.