To simplify communication with your accountant or the payroll department, you can create a separate Employee profile in Personio for them, thus allowing them to independently retrieve relevant and up-to-date payroll-information from Personio. 

Creating a new Employee Profile

First, create the required Employee profile. Make sure to give the fictitious employee being created for the accountant the employment type External so they are clearly distinguished by the system from internal employees.

You can find detailed information on creating Employee profiles here.

Please note that, as an external employee, the payroll accountant will be included in your billing plan in the usual way and thus must be taken into account in terms of the headcount of your current plan. Likewise, external employees are also included in the organizational chart.

Configuring Employee Roles

Next, it is essential to define which access permissions the external payroll accountant should receive within your Personio account.

If you would like to enforce a strict separation between the external payroll accountant role and all your internal employees, or the All employees system role, start by carrying out the Restricting Access Rights for the External Payroll Accountant Role step. Otherwise, simply follow the steps below:

Create a new Role for the External Payroll Accountant

Create another employee role for the external payroll accountant. This role receives Viewing rights for the Payroll section, allowing the owner of the role to access information and download already generated exports. The administration of preliminary payroll and its monthly approval will continue to be carried out by a responsible internal employee. If you have more than one legal entity, grant the access rights for each legal entity.

Furthermore, so that everything runs smoothly, the external payroll accountant role should also include viewing rights for the Work contracts, Absence certificates and Study documentation document categories, as the documents stored there contain important information on the employment contract and health insurance reporting.

You should assign viewing rights to the Payroll document category so that the external payroll accountant can download documents from this category, as shown in the screenshot below.

Additionally, you should assign the external payroll accountant viewing rights for the individual Sections of the employee data that contain attributes included in the Preliminary payroll. 

Once the Import documents section of this employee role has been activated, the external payroll accountant will be able to import payslips and other relevant documents for all employees by using the bulk upload function. However, access to the imported files is determined according to the access rights defined for the documents section.

You should also give the external payroll accountant viewing rights for all absence types that are relevant to payroll (for example, paid vacation, sickness, etc.) in the Absences section.

You can find a detailed overview of access rights here.

Creating Reminders

You have the option to create reminders for the external payroll accountant, for example of upcoming termination dates or absences. These reminders can be individually customized to match your requirements.

This article explains how you can configure one-time and recurring reminders in Personio.

Security Settings

To ensure maximum security, you can set up 2-factor authentication for the external payroll accountant's login, if they are not logging in via a Google account. This would mean that all employees in this role would have to complete an additional authentication step using a Google Authenticator token when logging in.

German customers who use the DATEV-integration, can create a DATEV export in Personio that can then be imported directly into DATEV. You can find further information on this topic here. 

Restricting Access Rights for the External Payroll Accountant Role

In order to maintain a strict separation between the external payroll accountant and your internal employees or the All employees system role, you will need to adjust the All employees role accordingly and create two new Employee roles.

Carry out the following steps to achieve this:

1. Adjust the All employees system role: Remove all the rights associated with the All employees system role, because this role acts as a base role and is thus automatically assigned by default to every active employee, internal and external.
2. Create a new role for internal employees: Create a new employee role called, for example, All internal employees. Going forward, this role should exist alongside the All employees system role and include all internal employees. Since the All internal employees role replaces the system role, grant this role the access rights that internal employees should receive in your account. Remember to always assign newly created employees to this role since this will no longer be done automatically, as it was with the system role. You can find out how to configure employee roles here.