Payroll Cloud Advanced Journal Configuration

If you need more control over how your journal maps to your chart of accounts, for example different nominal codes per pay type, department splits, or separate employee/employer liability lines, you can use the Advanced Journal Builder instead of a standard configuration in Payroll Cloud.

When to use Advanced journal
Build your advanced journal
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When to use Advanced journal

Use the advanced builder if you want to send salary, overtime, and other pay types to different nominal codes, break journal lines down by department or cost code, or split employee and employer contributions onto separate lines. If a single nominal per category is all you need, the standard journal configuration is simpler and remains available.

Before you begin

Have these to hand:

The nominal codes from your chart of accounts that payroll should post to
Your pay element names as they appear in Ciphr Payroll (e.g. "Salary", "Overtime", "Bonus")
A clear idea of how your finance team wants the journal grouped, for example by department, by cost code, or as totals
Your export format, Generic, Sage, or Xero

Build your advanced journal

Step 1: Open the builder

Go to Company Setup > Journal Config. You'll see a list of all journal configurations for your company.

To edit an existing advanced configuration, click the edit pencil on its row.
To create a new one, click + Add configuration and choose the advanced template.

The builder is organised into five tabs: Basics, Debits, Credits, Export Layout, and Review. You can work through them left to right, or jump between tabs at any time. Three buttons sit in the top-right corner throughout: Cancel, Validate, Save.

Step 2: Basics tab

Fill in the high-level details:

Configuration name, a label you'll recognise later, for example "Sage Monthly"
Description, optional notes about what this configuration is for

Underneath, the Current journal shape panel gives a read-only summary of how the journal is currently set up, a handy sanity check as you make changes on later tabs.

Step 3: Debits tab

The Debits tab controls everything on the expense side of the journal: gross wages, employer NI, and employer pension contributions.

Choose how debit rows are grouped: click Add to move available fields into selected groups, to choose how the expense side splits into journal lines.

You can drag the groups to reorder the list as the order matters. The first field splits at the top level, the second splits within that, and so on. Available fields include Department, Employee, Pay Element Text, Pay Element Type, Cost Code, Director Status, and any analysis fields your company uses. Leave the picker empty if you want all debit rows combined into a single line.

Apply your Default Debit Rule for Gross Pay, Employer NI and Employer Pension. The description is optional and can be left blank.

Add your debit rules: rules tell the system which nominal codes to use for different kinds of pay. Click + Add rule in the left-hand list to create one.

Add one or more conditions. A condition is a field (eg Department, Pay Element Text/ Type, etc), an operator (eg equals, is one of, contains etc), and a value (eg Salary). When a rule has more than one condition, all of them must be true for it to apply.
Expand the Debit outputs for Gross Pay, Employer NI, and/or Employer Pension. For each one, set the Nominal code and any optional sub nominals or description. Leave the Nominal field blank and that output simply won't appear in the journal.
Use placeholders for dynamic values, such as {{department}}, instead of hard-coding them. At export, the placeholder is replaced with the real value. Click the placeholder buttons under the field to insert them.

Rules are checked from the top down, and the first rule that matches a piece of pay is the one used. Drag rules to reorder them, put the most specific rules at the top. The Default debit rule is always pinned at the bottom as a safety net for anything not matched earlier.

Tip: Because each rule sets Gross Pay, Employer NI, and Employer Pension at the same time, you usually only need one rule per pay type, not three separate ones.

Step 4: Credits tab

The Credits tab covers the liability and net-pay side of the journal, PAYE, NI, pension, student and postgraduate loans, net wages, and deductions.

Choose how credit rows are grouped: available fields here are Department, Employee, and Director, pay-element and cost-code groupings aren't available on this side because HMRC, pension, and BACS payments aren't tied to individual pay elements. Leave the picker empty to keep one liability line per category.

Combined or split contributions: two checkboxes sit above the table, Split NI into employee and employer rows, and Split pension into employee and employer rows, tick either if your accounting system reconciles those portions to different control accounts. If you switch this later, you'll be asked to confirm, and any overrides on the side you're hiding will be removed, so it's worth deciding upfront.

Set the control account nominals: the table lists every credit-side category, PAYE, NI (or Employee/Employer NI liability if split), student/postgraduate loans, pension (or Employee/Employer Pension liability if split), net wages, deductions, deduction orders, and deduction order costs. Type a nominal code directly into a row to set the default, or click the edit icon to add sub nominals and overrides, extra rules that send specific cases to a different nominal, for example sending director pension liability to its own code.

Step 5: Export Layout tab

Choose which columns appear in the exported journal report and what order they're in.

Selected columns (left) shows what will appear in the export. Drag to reorder. Required columns, Nominal, Debit, and Credit, are always included.
Available columns (right) lists optional extras such as Sub Nominals, Department, Pay Element Text, Pay Element Type, Cost Code, Employee Code, Employee Name, Payroll ID, Journal Description, Pay Date, and any analysis fields. Click + Add to include one.

Each available column has a helper note telling you when it will be populated, for example, an Employee Name column stays blank unless you've grouped by Employee.

Step 6: Review tab

Before saving, go to the Review tab and then click Validate in the header bar. The system checks your setup and groups the results into panels covering general warnings, debit rule issues, and credit control account issues.

Each rule or override may show a badge:

Badge	Meaning
Shadowed	An earlier rule already covers everything this one would match, so it will never be used
No matches	Nothing in your current payroll data fits this rule
Missing nominal	No nominal code has been entered
Invalid placeholder	A placeholder refers to something the system doesn't recognise

Hover any badge for a fuller explanation. The warning disappears once you've fixed the rule.

Validation is a sanity check, not a guarantee, it won't confirm that every pay element name you've typed actually exists in your payroll data, so it's worth comparing your rules against your real pay element list before going live.

Step 7: Save

Click Save in the header bar. The configuration will be used the next time you run a journal export for this company.

Tips:

Put the most specific rules at the top of the list, with the broad fallback at the bottom.
Use placeholders like {{department}} rather than hard-coding values, so the journal keeps working as your company changes.
Decide whether to split NI and pension before configuring overrides, switching later discards them.
Pay element types are matched without worrying about capital letters, but spelling and spacing still need to match exactly.
Each company has its own journal configuration, they can't be shared across companies.

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