This is the lesson to keep. One confirmed monthly payslip, one journal entry, every line accounted for.

What the entry contains. Confirm a UAE monthly payslip as usual, and the journal entry carries the basic pay, every allowance, each statutory deduction on its own payable, and the net wage on 201401 Net Salaries Payable (WPS) with the employee as partner — and no Adjustment Entry.

The example. Gulf Fittings Trading LLC pays Fatima Al Marzouqi for August 2026. She is a UAE national first insured on or after 31 October 2023, so Federal Decree-Law 57/2023 applies: 11% employee and 15% employer, on a stored contribution salary of AED 25,000. She has asked for her ILOE premium to be collected through payroll, and her basic salary puts her in Category B at AED 10 per month, to which the payroll layer adds 5% VAT by default. Sources: FDL 57/2023 rates as published by GPSSA; ILOE Category B premium as published by the scheme operator.

Net pay is AED 27,000.00 less AED 2,760.50, which is AED 24,239.50. Now the journal entry that lands in the ledger when the payslip is confirmed.

Read the partner column first. Only one line carries a partner, and it is the net wage. That is the per-employee subledger doing its work: the balance on 201401 is not one number for the payroll run, it is one open item per person, which is what lets you clear Fatima's wage specifically when Fatima is specifically paid. Course 4.4 shows the other end of it, where registering the WPS payment posts one debit line per employee against this same account.

Read the two allowance lines next. Housing and transport both map to 400012 Staff Other Allowances, and they still arrive as two lines rather than one. Every allowance keeps its own line because every allowance is its own rule, which means the entry can be read against the payslip line by line without arithmetic in your head.

Now the last two lines, which are the ones people miss. The employer's pension share posts as a pair — an expense of AED 3,750.00 and a payable of AED 3,750.00 — from a single rule. It reaches the profit and loss account without changing net pay: Fatima's net is AED 24,239.50 with or without those two lines, because they debit and credit each other. This is how an employer cost that never touches the employee's money still becomes visible in your results, and it is why the entry totals AED 30,750.00 against a payroll gross of AED 27,000.00. The same shape applies to a GCC national, where the employer's share posts to 201403 GCC Social Schemes Payable instead.

Count the lines and look for what is not there. Eight lines, every one of them on an account you could defend to an auditor, and no Adjustment Entry anywhere. That absence is the deliverable of Lesson 1, and it is worth checking on the first entry you produce in a live database rather than assuming it.

One thing that will look like a bug and is not. The employer contribution does not appear on the payslip PDF. It is not supposed to: it is outside net pay. It does appear in the journal entry, as an expense and a payable — which is exactly where a cost that the employee never sees belongs.

Final settlement is a different entry, and the difference is instructive. Confirm a UAE Final Settlement payslip and the gratuity debits the end-of-service provision, releasing what was accrued month by month. Take Rahul Menon, an expatriate leaving Gulf Fittings Trading LLC after three years, whose end-of-service engine has computed a gratuity of AED 25,200.00 under Article 51 of Federal Decree-Law 33/2021 — twenty-one days for each year of the first five years of service, on the last basic wage. Course 4.3 covers that computation; this course covers where it lands.

Notice which account the gratuity did not debit. It did not go to 400008 End Of Service Indemnity, because that expense was already recognised, month by month, by the provision runs in course 4.3 — each of which debited 400008 and credited 202001. Charging the settlement to the expense account again would recognise the same cost twice: once while the employee worked, once when they left. Debiting 202001 instead releases the provision that was built for exactly this payment, which is what a provision is for.

Where that account is set matters more than it looks. The gratuity rule follows the end-of-service provision account set on the company, not on the mapping row. You cannot change it on the mapping alone — change it on the company, and the mapping follows. If a settlement is re-pointed away from the account the monthly provision credits, confirmation fails with a message telling you the gratuity must be debited to the end-of-service provision account. The fix is always the same: change the account on the company.

Companies on a funded scheme get no gratuity mapping at all. If you are enrolled in the Alternative End-of-Service Benefits scheme — DIFC/DEWS, or the federal scheme established by Cabinet Resolution 96/2023 — there is nothing here to map, because the payout comes from the fund rather than from a provision of yours. An absent gratuity mapping on a funded company is the correct result, not a gap to fill in. Source: Cabinet Resolution 96/2023, issued 10 October 2023.

The failure mode. The complaint that reaches finance is usually "the settlement did not post". Read the message before you read the mapping: if it names the end-of-service provision account, someone changed where the gratuity points, and the company record is where you undo it.