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.

Note: The reports you see in Remote, and the layout they are presented in, can differ depending on the product(s) enabled on your account and the role/permissions you have.

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

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.

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:
4. • 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.

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.

Once your report is ready:

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

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.

• 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.