Payroll is a financial record of wages, net pay, paid vacations, and deductions for an employee. Basically, anything that relates to giving money or benefits to an employee. This is one of the more complex tasks in terms of accounting, simply because there are many different accounts, people, and agencies involved in the act of paying an employee's salary.

Payroll is typically accounted for as an expense. Sometimes, accountants will "store" some payroll expenses in a short term liability account. This is useful for things such as payroll taxes, which may be paid to the government at a different times from paying employee salaries. This chapter will present a methodology which expenses payroll immediately for salaries, but store taxes in a liability account.

	Note
	GnuCash does not (yet) have an integrated payroll system. What this means is that while you can track payroll expenses in GnuCash, the actual calculation of taxes and deductions will have to be done outside of GnuCash.