ADP payroll register
The per-pay-period detail of what each employee was paid, earnings, taxes, deductions, and net check, that people wrongly read as "total labor cost" or as the year's taxable wages.
The shape, how the file is really laid out
Exported to Excel or PDF-to-Excel, the sheet opens with banner rows above
the column header: company name, pay-period-ending date, check (pay) date,
and report title, usually spanning merged cells in rows 1-4, so the real
header row is not row 1. Detail is one block of employee rows carrying
columns like Regular, Overtime, Bonus, Gross Pay, then pre-tax deductions
(401k, medical), then employee taxes (Fed W/H, Social Security, Medicare,
state), then Net Pay. Department or location SUBTOTAL rows are interleaved
between employee blocks, and a "Company Totals" grand-total row sits at the
bottom of the same column grid. Amounts are USD, comma-grouped, with
parentheses or leading minus for reversals; the pay date, not the period
end, is the tax year and cash date.
The traps
Gross Pay is not employer cost: the register omits the employer share of Social Security/Medicare, FUTA/SUI, the employer 401k match, and employer-paid premiums, so total company outlay exceeds Net Pay + employee taxes shown.
- Every trap in this export, worked through
- The reconciliation anchor, the total the file asserts about itself
- The refusal cases, when to stop and ask instead of guess
Reference: ADP RUN Powered by ADP report guide · ADP Workforce Now standard reports documentation