Lesson 3 — Six accounts reused, six created, and one deliberately left alone
Now the accounts themselves. Twelve of them carry a UAE payroll, and a thirteenth is the interesting one, because the module refuses to use it.
The obligation this table serves. Each statutory counterparty is owed a specific amount by a specific date, and the amounts do not net off against each other. The pension authority's money is not the employee's money, and neither is the insurance premium you collected on the worker's behalf. Separate creditors need separate payables, or the balance you are looking at is an average of obligations rather than any one of them.
Six accounts are reused from the UAE chart. These already exist and keep their meaning.
| Purpose | Account |
|---|---|
| Basic salary expense | 400003 Basic Salary |
| Allowances and overtime | 400012 Staff Other Allowances |
| Employer pension expense | 400073 Social Insurance Expense |
| End-of-service expense | 400008 End Of Service Indemnity |
| End-of-service provision | 202001 End of Service Provision |
| Pension and social insurance payable | 201021 Social Insurance Payable |
Reuse is the point of the resolution order in Lesson 2. If your trial balance already reports salary expense on 400003, it still does after this module installs, and last year's comparatives still line up with this year's.
Six accounts the UAE chart does not have are created. These are the genuine gaps.
| Code | Name | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
201401 |
Net Salaries Payable (WPS) | Net wages owed to employees, one open item per person |
201403 |
GCC Social Schemes Payable | Amounts owed under a GCC national's home social scheme |
201404 |
ILOE Premiums Collected | Premiums collected from employees and not yet remitted |
201405 |
Other Payroll Deductions Payable | Payroll deductions owed onward that have no payable of their own |
102901 |
Employee Loans Receivable | Loan balances owed back to the company by employees |
102902 |
Salary Advances Receivable | Advances paid against future salary and not yet recovered |
Look at where those codes sit. They are placed in free gaps inside the right family, so a future release cannot collide with them. 201401 to 201405 are current liabilities among the other payables; 102901 and 102902 are receivables among the other receivables. A new account bolted onto the end of the chart would sort into the wrong section of every report you print, and would be the first thing an auditor asks about.
Now the account that is not used, and why. The UAE chart contains 201004 Accrued - Salaries. It has the right name for net wages, and it is not used for them. The reason is a property of the account rather than a preference: it ships as non-reconcilable, so a wage payment could never be matched against it. Changing that on an account the localisation owns is not this module's call.
Sit with what non-reconcilable means in practice. Reconciliation is how a payable stops being a liability. You raise the net wage as a credit when you confirm the payslip, you pay it, and you match the payment against the credit — and the matched pair leaves your open items. On a non-reconcilable account there is no matching. The credits accumulate, the debits accumulate, the balance may even be right, and the one question you cannot answer is which specific wage is still unpaid. For a UAE company that has to prove payment worker by worker, that is not a small loss.
So the module creates 201401 instead, reconcilable, and puts every net wage there with the employee as its partner. It leaves 201004 untouched, with its own definition intact for whatever your accountants already use it for. This is the pattern to recognise across the whole Odoone range: where a localisation account cannot do the job, the module adds one beside it rather than quietly redefining something you did not ask it to change.
The failure mode. Someone tidying the chart will eventually notice that net wages are on 201401 while an account named Accrued - Salaries sits nearby, and will re-point the mapping in the name of neatness. The symptom arrives weeks later, when the wage payment cannot be matched against anything and every month's net wage is still showing as outstanding. If you see that, check the mapping before you check the payment.