How to use the Payroll Cost Report

You can use the payroll cost report in Remote to understand your company’s payroll expenses. The report provides a detailed breakdown of payroll costs by employee, department, or cost center. This article explains how to run the report, and understand what to expect based on your setup.

See also: How to map pay items to my General Ledger (GL) accounts

Before you begin

Before running a Payroll Cost report, make sure:

• You’ve imported or created your chart of accounts in Remote, and
• Your pay items are mapped to general ledger accounts.

• If these steps aren’t completed, the report won’t run. Instead, you'll see a message prompting you to complete account mapping. You’ll be guided to the relevant screen to do so.

  Additional notes:

• Report history is saved in the Payroll Cost report screen and cannot be deleted.
• Current report dimensions include cost centre and department.
• If you notice formatting issues with non-English characters in your download, try using the XLSX file format for better compatibility.
• Only users with Salaries permission can access the Payroll Cost report broken down at Employee level.

Navigating to the payroll cost report

Once your accounts are mapped, follow these steps to access the report:

1. Go to your Report library in Remote.
2. Select the Payroll section.
3. Choose one of the following report types:
   • Payroll cost – employee: View payroll costs by individual team member.
   • Payroll cost – by department: Group costs by employee departments.
   • Payroll cost – by cost center: Group costs by the cost centers assigned to employees.

Run the report

After selecting the report type, you can run the report using one of the following filters:

• By Month: Shows costs for a specific calendar month.
• By Payroll Run: Shows costs for a selected payroll run.

The system will store a history of reports you’ve run. These reports cannot be deleted.

View and download results

Once your report is ready:

1. You’ll land on the results screen after running the report
2. To download it:
   • Select the three dots ⋯ next to the report
   • Choose your preferred file format to export

Example

Let’s say you need to create a Payroll Cost report for your company’s October payroll, broken down by department:

• In the report library, select Payroll and Payroll cost – by department.
• Under Payroll run, choose the relevant Payroll run for October 2025.
• If you wish to run the report accross main and offcycle runs, choose Month from the drop-down and select October 2025.
• Run the report and download it as XLSX to preserve special characters.

Troubleshooting and tips

• Missing report? Check that you’ve mapped your accounts and uploaded your chart of accounts.
• Non-English characters not displaying correctly? Try downloading as XLSX instead of CSV.