Sometimes the labor costs from a payroll should all be charged to a particular company within your enterprise, or all be entered in a particular ledger. In this case, you select the code for the company or ledger from the appropriate segment of the Cost Allocation flexfield when defining the payroll.

Also at the payroll level, you can select codes for suspense accounts. A suspense account is one that collects costs from the payroll if segment entries at lower levels are missing. For example, if an employee receives a Special Production Bonus but there is no GL code for this earnings type to debit in the Cost Allocation flexfield, the cost of the bonus goes into the suspense account.

Entries of sums in a suspense account alert you to missing codes, and provide a way to hold unallocated costs until you can make manual journal entries to the correct accounts. Since codes entered in the Cost Allocation flexfield at levels below the payroll level override any entered at the payroll level, costs go to a suspense account only when the correct account codes are not entered at the element link level.