A payroll register is an employer’s record of one pay run: a single listing showing, for every employee paid in that period, the hours and rates behind the pay, gross pay, each tax withheld, each other deduction, and net pay. One row is one employee for one period, and one register is one run. It foots both ways, meaning each row adds across from gross to net and each column adds down to a run total.
What Is in a Payroll Register?
A row opens with the detail identifying whose pay it is, then the inputs: hours worked at the rates that apply to them, or the share of an annual salary the period covers. The gross column follows, and it is a starting point rather than an answer, because federal law does not use one definition of wages (gross wages). Where a non-exempt employee, one the overtime rules cover, worked past 40 hours in the workweek, straight time and the half-time increment are shown apart (overtime premium). That 40-hour line comes from the statute, which requires at least one and one-half times the regular rate for the hours above it (29 U.S.C. 207(a)(1)).
Then the subtractions, one column each: federal income tax withheld, the Social Security and Medicare lines (Medicare tax), state and local withholding, and every other deduction. Net pay closes the row. Beside it sit the employer’s own taxes on the same wages, a separate charge on the firm that comes out of nobody’s pay (payroll tax).
The Record Federal Wage and Hour Law Requires
Nothing in the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal wage and hour statute, names a payroll register. The Act tells every covered employer to make, keep and preserve records of the persons employed and of the wages, hours and other conditions and practices of employment, and leaves the list of what those records hold to regulation (29 U.S.C. 211(c)). It is deliberately format free as well: the Act requires no particular form for the records (US Department of Labor, Fact Sheet #21).
The list itself lives in the Labor Department’s recordkeeping regulation. It runs to 12 items for each employee the minimum wage provisions reach, with or without the overtime provisions alongside them, and six of those items are what a register carries by design: hours worked each workday and total hours each workweek, straight-time earnings and overtime premium recorded as two separate items, all additions to and deductions from wages each pay period, total wages paid each pay period, and the date of payment with the period it covers (eCFR, 29 CFR 516.2(a)(7) through (a)(12)). Five of the other six are standing details about the employee, and they usually live in the employee master file. The sixth is only partly standing: alongside the basis on which pay is figured, it asks for the regular hourly rate in any workweek where overtime is due, and the amount and nature of each payment excluded from that regular rate, and those two change from workweek to workweek. Employees exempt under the executive, administrative, professional and outside sales exemptions are not outside recordkeeping either. They sit on a list of their own (eCFR, 29 CFR 516.3).
Those payroll records are preserved for at least 3 years from the last date of entry (eCFR, 29 CFR 516.5).
The tax side sets a longer clock on the same paperwork, and a destruction policy has to satisfy that one: keep all records of employment taxes for at least 4 years (IRS, Publication 15).
Where the Register Gets Used
In the books the register is the source document, not the entry: the run’s column totals are what the payroll journal entry is built from (journal entry). It is also the support a wages accrual is traced back to, and a reviewer testing that balance is testing the register (adjusted trial balance).
Registers accumulate. The runs paid in January, February and March add into the quarter Form 941 reports, and line 2 of that return takes the amounts that would also be included in box 1 of the employees’ Forms W-2 (IRS, Instructions for Form 941).
The same registers then foot to the year. Reconcile the amounts shown in boxes 2, 3, 5 and 7 from all Forms W-3 with their respective amounts from the yearly totals of the quarterly Forms 941 (IRS, General Instructions for Forms W-2 and W-3). When that tie does not come out, the registers are where the difference is found, run by run.
A Worked Footing on One Weekly Run
Say a firm pays three staff for one weekly period on the amounts below, with withholding and deductions taken as given.
GROSS FED W/H SOC SEC MEDICARE OTHER NET
Employee A 2,400.00 288.00 148.80 34.80 120.00 1,808.40
Employee B 1,800.00 171.00 111.60 26.10 90.00 1,401.30
Employee C 1,200.00 84.00 74.40 17.40 0.00 1,024.20
RUN TOTAL 5,400.00 543.00 334.80 78.30 210.00 4,233.90Footing it both ways is the check a preparer runs before anything posts.
Payroll Register, Payroll Journal, and Pay Stub
Three records describe the same pay run, and none of them substitutes for another. The register is the employer’s whole-run record. The payroll journal is what that register becomes in the books, the run’s totals posted into the general ledger (general ledger), which is why a ledger wage balance can be right while nobody can explain one employee’s pay from it.
A pay stub is one employee’s statement of their own line in that same run, gross to net (gross vs net pay). Different again is the individual earnings record, which follows one employee across every run of the year and carries the year-to-date totals a wage statement is built from. Read a register across and it gives you the run. Read an earnings record down and it gives you the employee.
Accountably places trained offshore accountants inside US CPA and EA firms, and a firm can put one pay period’s register and the entry behind it through a trial task before its own reviewer relies on the work.
