Available for the following Payroll plans: Employment Unlimited
Available for the following user access levels: Admin
To ensure a smooth migration to Employment Hero Payroll, it is essential to enter your company's opening balances before your first pay run. This involves transferring year-to-date (YTD) payroll totals and employee entitlement data from your previous provider.
Using our Opening Balances feature to import this information accurately is critical for correct tax calculations and efficient T4 preparation at year-end.
Getting started
The following will guide you through the process of importing and exporting your organization's opening balances.
- Click the Settings menu.
- In the Payroll section, click on Opening Balances.
- On this screen, you can download a template to get started. Click the Download template button to export either a CSV or Excel file.
- Open the downloaded file on your computer.
- Carefully enter the YTD earnings, deductions, and tax information for each employee. You can add data for employees across multiple provinces in the same file.
- Save your changes to the file.
- Return to the Opening Balances screen in the platform and click or drag the completed file to be uploaded.
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Click the Upload button.
Helpful Hint
After the importing process finishes, a summary appears on your screen outlining what data was successfully uploaded and what errors occurred.
- Click the Settings menu.
- In the Payroll section, click on Opening Balances.
- Click on the Download template button and select the format you prefer, either .csv or .xlsx.
- The opening balances in the downloaded template will be filled in.
Further information
To ensure the accuracy and integrity of your payroll records, all opening balance fields are automatically locked after your organization processes its first finalized pay run.
Once a pay run is finalized, the system treats the opening balances as the official starting point for all future payroll calculations. Locking these fields prevents accidental changes that could affect payroll history, tax calculations, and official reporting.
What You Can Still Do:
- View Data: You can still view all opening balance figures by navigating to Settings > Payroll > Opening Balances or in an individual employee's Pay & Compensation > Opening Balances tab.
- Export Data: You can export a file containing all employee opening balances for your records at any time as explained above.
After the first finalized pay run, you will no longer be able to import a file or manually edit any of the opening balance fields.
Each company’s YTD table may look slightly different due to variations in columns like benefits, income types, and compensation. For simplicity, we’ll focus on explaining the default columns here.
| Column Title | Description |
|---|---|
| Regular pay | The total amounts paid to the employee, including: • Salary and wages • Overtime • Statutory holiday pay |
| Vacation pay | The total vacation pay paid to hourly or terminated salaried employees. |
| Bonus | The total amount paid to an employee, over and above the usual earnings, generally at the employer's discretion. There are two types of bonuses: "Work-Related" and "Discretionary." |
| Commissions | Typically a percentage of services rendered or products sold paid to employees. |
| Retroactive pay | The total amount of delayed payments, also known as "back pay." This is the income owed to an employee from a previous pay period and paid out in another pay period. |
| Severance | Total amount of wages paid to an employee whose employment has been "severed." You can read more on this here. |
| Canadian Pension Plan (CPP) | The employee’s base CPP contributions and first additional CPP contributions. |
| Canada Pension Plan 2 (CPP2) | The employee's second additional CPP contributions. |
| Quebec Pension Plan (QPP) | The employee’s base QPP contributions and first additional QPP contributions. |
| Quebec Pension Plan 2 (QPP2) | The employee's second additional QPP contributions. |
| Employment Insurance (EI) | The total amount of employee EI premiums remitted for each employee. |
| Québec Parental Insurance Plan (QPIP) | The total amount of employee QPIP premiums remitted for each employee. |
| Income Tax | The mandatory federal and provincial taxes deducted from each employee's pay. This column shows the total taxes combined. |
| Income Tax Federal | The mandatory federal taxes deducted from each employee's pay. |
| Income Tax Provincial | The mandatory provincial taxes deducted from each employee's pay. |
Explore related content
- How to Add an Employee's Vacation Starting Balance This feature allows you to select an employee file and enter their accrued Year to Date (YTD) time off balances.
- How to add opening balances in the employee profile. This feature allows you to select an employee file and enter their existing Year to Date (YTD) earnings amounts.