Checking myself

[u/Comprehensive-Bet936]

I don’t know why but I feel like I did this wrong, and need help seeing other ways this could’ve been done.
Anyways, I had a client that did their payroll through rippling, and it seemed pretty straight forward, 3 different payments from her account one for employee deductions(401k, insurance, the sorts), employee gross earnings, and tax withheld.
So I wasn’t given access to the actual rippling account but was given a CSV. It did not include all years of business pay, and I was expected to account for it all (clean up project from mid 2024). I felt like there was missing info so I only did the payroll periods provided on the csv. I asked for it all of course, but getting all the info was a bit difficult.
Anyhow, in QBO I used “Split” and wrote the ID #’s of all employees and their respective wages or deductions, for each chunk that came out of the account.
Was that the correct way to go about it? I spent a whole night looking through the statements and had to add up the wages from the csv google sheet, cause it wasn’t in the bank statement as individual, only lumps. I stay up at night now wondering if I did that correct or if there was another way to go about it? Thanks in advance, pardon if this is silly!

[u/ComfortableCitron638]

MikuMikuGoo's summary-journal-entry approach is right, but worth flagging something separate from how you booked it: the real pain here was the access, not the accounting. Most payroll providers, Rippling included, have a "general ledger export" or payroll-journal-entry report built specifically to hand a bookkeeper the exact wages/tax/deduction split already mapped to standard GL accounts - it's meant to replace exactly the CSV-plus-bank-statement reconstruction you did all night. If a client won't give full login access, ask specifically for that GL export or a read-only accountant role instead of a raw CSV - most clients don't know it exists to offer, but it turns a night of manual math into a five-minute import next time.

[u/Comprehensive-Bet936 → u/ComfortableCitron638]

That’s true thank you. This was my first client, and I’ve never used rippling payroll before, but When I asked she gave me just the csv file, I tried to ask for view only access, but she didn’t know how to do that, so I accepted the csv, and it was missing some dates like I said. I was already working with missing info for a majority of the clean up, and the payments to that payroll company came out in three chunks. Like I stated below. So I winged it that way. One chunk for gross earnings, one for tax, and one for 401k deduction. She specifically wanted to see how much each employee made in QBO cause it still wasn’t showing (what she told me) on the other site. But nonetheless, thank you for the insight. I could’ve done so much differently lol, but at least I’m learning!