Your payroll liability accounts should have a shape

Payroll liabilities are the best diagnostic accounts in a set of books, because unlike most balances they are supposed to look a particular way.

The rhythm#

Every pay run charges the liability. Every remittance clears it. If you remit monthly and pay monthly, the account should be nil after the remittance and one period's worth before it.

That gives you a test that needs no payroll expertise at all: is this balance a whole number of periods? If income tax payable sits at $1,847.32 and a period is $1,100, something is wrong, and you found it in ten seconds.

What each shape means#

Two periods when you remit monthly — a remittance was missed. Check before the CRA does; the penalty is on the amount, not the delay, so a missed remittance costs the same whether you find it in week one or month three.

A balance that never clears, growing slowly — the remittance is being posted to expense instead of to the liability. This double-counts the cost and leaves the liability outstanding forever. It is the single most common payroll posting error.

A small residual after remitting — usually a rounding difference between what the payroll system calculated and what was actually paid, or an adjustment from a prior period that was never cleaned up. Small, but it accumulates, and it makes the whole-number test stop working.

A negative balance — you remitted more than you charged. Either a double-remittance, or a pay run was reversed after the remittance went out.

Net pay payable with a balance after payday — someone was not paid, or the payment was posted somewhere else.

The reconciliation#

For each liability account, four numbers and a comparison:

Then ask whether the closing balance matches the expected shape. That is the whole control, and the free template is laid out exactly this way.

Three cross-checks are worth adding, because they catch the errors the balance alone will not:

• Gross pay in the ledger equals gross on the payroll report. If they differ, the journal was posted at the wrong amount.
• Employer contributions were expensed, not netted. They are a cost, not a reduction of the liability.
• The remittance hit the liability, not expense. The one that causes the slow-growing balance above.

Why this beats waiting for a notice#

The CRA reconciles your remittances against the slips you file at year end. If they disagree, you find out months later, in a letter, with the burden on you to explain a discrepancy in a period you have stopped thinking about.

Reconciling monthly means the same discrepancy is a five-minute question about last month's pay run, while the payroll register is still open in another tab.

Where the numbers come from#

Comma does not run payroll. What it does is take the journal your payroll provider produces and keep each liability in its own account, so the shape is visible without assembling it — and so the remittance deadline is set against a balance you can actually see rather than a figure someone re-derives from bank statements each month.

The gross-to-net post covers why the entry has to create those liabilities in the first place, and what goes wrong when the bank payment is booked straight to wage expense instead.