How accounting integrations empower HR and payroll software solutions to provide an unrivaled UX

Your HR software likely collects data that can help customers carry out key financial processes in their accounting systems, from managing payroll accounting to creating budget forecasts.

To help you better understand how accounting integrations can benefit your HR solution—and your customers—we’ll break down specific use cases. We’ll then explain why Merge is uniquely positioned to support any accounting integrations your HR solution needs.

Help customers sync payroll journal entries seamlessly

Imagine that you offer either a standalone payroll solution or include it as part of your HR software.

To ensure customers’ accounting systems’ general ledgers include payroll journal entries on time and without discrepancies with your product, you can connect your solution with their accounting systems and build the following data flow: Once payroll is processed successfully in your system, a corresponding journal entry is added to the general ledger in your customer's accounting (i.e., ERP) system.

Each payroll journal entry that’s POSTed should also include all the pre-populated data the customer’s finance team needs to auto-create the journal entry. This includes payment dates, descriptions, affected general ledger accounts, and the associated debits and credits.

But before you can begin POSTing payroll journal entries, your customers will need to perform mappings from your product to their ERPs so that the journal entries affect the right general ledger accounts, often determined by earnings types, deduction types, or tax types. Some of your customers may even require a journal entry's line items to be broken out by department or location so that their finance teams have clear visibility on all dimensions of payroll expenditure. 

While not an HR platform, Taxbit, a customer of ours, offers up a good example. The fintech solution lets their customers map activities to their accounting systems' general ledgers' chart of accounts, enabling customers to create double-sided journal entries from TaxBit.

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Empower customers to account for all the expenses that’ve been approved

Your HR solution might allow customers’ employees to submit expenses and get them approved, but without a way to add them to customers’ accounting systems seamlessly, many can slip through the cracks and not get processed or accounted for.

To prevent this from happening, you can integrate with customers’ accounting systems and build the following sync: Any time an expense is marked as approved in your HR software, it’ll get created in that customer’s accounting system, which includes pre-populated fields, like the amount that’s expensed, the requester, a description of the request, etc.

Someone in finance can then process the expense for payment and account for it properly in their general ledger. 

Related: What is a tax rate API? Here's what you need to know

Enable customers to build comprehensive financial reports

Say you offer an HR software that manages payroll and allows employees to submit expenses.

Your customers can leverage this data in their accounting systems’ financial dashboards to make informed decisions around headcount planning, expense policy changes, and more.

To help them do just that, you can integrate with customers’ accounting systems, and then sync payroll and expenses to predefined financial reports on a certain cadence (e.g., once a week). 

Related: How to use the QuickBooks Online API effectively

Power your HR software’s accounting integrations with Merge

Merge, the leading unified API solution, lets you add more than a dozen accounting integrations to your product by building to a single, unified API.

Merge also provides robust Common Models for every accounting integration so that you can sync a wide range of financial data with customers’ accounting solutions. And the platform offers additional features, like Field Mapping, that let you access data beyond these Common Models, ensuring you meet every customer's unique accounting integration needs.

Learn more about how Merge can support your HR solution’s accounting integrations by scheduling a demo with one of our integration experts.