A multi-entity business manually posting payroll from Employment Hero to NetSuite
Automating Payroll Journal Entries for Multi-Entity Businesses
Posting time: days to 15 minutes
This blueprint describes our proven approach. Specific outcomes vary by engagement.
Ideal For
Any Australian multi-entity business (retail groups, franchise operators) manually building payroll journals in NetSuite after each Employment Hero/KeyPay pay run.
The Problem
Each entity runs its own Employment Hero instance. After every fortnightly pay run, payroll exports CSV summaries, manually constructs journal entries in NetSuite mapping base salary, overtime, allowances, superannuation guarantee at 11.5%, PAYG withholding, leave accruals, workers compensation, and salary sacrifice to correct GL accounts. This takes 1-2 full days per pay cycle.
Inter-entity employees (staff splitting time across two legal entities) create painful complexity - their payroll costs need proportional allocation across subsidiaries. Errors are found during year-end audit preparation, months after they occurred.
Our Approach
Celigo integration flow triggered automatically after each Employment Hero pay run (via webhook or API polling). The flow pulls the complete pay run summary and an io.js transformation script maps each component to the correct NetSuite GL account using a configurable mapping table (NetSuite custom record so finance can adjust without code changes).
Mapping handles: base salary to department cost centre, overtime to separate GL account, super guarantee to liability account, PAYG to liability, leave accruals to provision accounts, workers comp to expense, allowances to category-specific accounts.
For each employee, the script determines correct subsidiary from Employment Hero entity assignment. Inter-entity employees generate split journal entries automatically based on time allocation (60/40 split creates two proportional entries across subsidiaries).
Journal entries created with "Pending Approval" status. Payroll manager gets Slack notification with summary (total per entity, flagged anomalies). One-click approval posts all entries. Full audit trail: every entry references the Employment Hero pay run ID.
Typical Impact
Posting time
Before
1-2 days
After
15 min review
GL discrepancies
Before
Common
After
Zero typical
Hours saved/year
Before
N/A
After
40-50 hours
Expected Outcome
Payroll posting drops from 1-2 days to 15 minutes of review and approval. GL discrepancies between Employment Hero and NetSuite drop to zero. 40-50 hours per year returned to the payroll team. Audit preparation simplified with automated traceability.
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