The last day of the month is when HR and the payroll lead start chasing the same numbers. Approved leave needs to land in payroll, balance adjustments need a paper trail, and the carryover from last year needs to look the same to finance as it does in the HR system. If the export is a manual copy out of a workbook, somebody is doing the same reconciliation twice and the second time usually catches a mistake.
The bookkeeping and payroll export in BreezeLeave is the CSV that ends that loop. It pulls approved leave per period, includes balance adjustments and carryover as line items, and keeps an audit-log reference for every export so finance can prove which version went to payroll. The HR lead generates it once per period. The payroll lead imports it. Both teams work from the same source of truth.
What the monthly payroll handoff actually needs
A payroll export needs more than a list of approved days. Payroll also wants balance adjustments, accrual updates, deductions for unpaid leave, sick-leave compensation inputs, and a clear reconciliation against last month. The bookkeeping export covers these explicitly.
Approved leave per period
One row per approved leave entry inside the export window. Each row includes employee identifier, leave type, start and end date, working-day count (weekends and country holidays excluded), and the country code. Half-days and partial-day requests appear with their fractional day counts intact.
Balance adjustments as line items
Every manual adjustment to a balance shows up as its own row. The adjustment carries a reason (gift day, error correction, sabbatical, parental leave grant), the day count, the user who applied it, and the timestamp. Payroll can match adjustments to the policy that approved them instead of guessing why a balance moved.
Carryover entries on the carryover date
At year end, unused days that roll into the next period appear as dated line items. If your company caps carryover at five days with a March 31 expiry, the export shows the carryover entry on the rollover date and a separate row for any expired remainder. Finance does not have to recalculate the cap.
Audit-log reference per export
Generating an export writes an audit record: user, period, filter scope, timestamp, and a file hash. If finance later asks which version of the export was used for the May payroll run, the audit log answers it. The same logging trail is described on the audit logs page if you want the full picture of what gets logged.
Why finance and HR want the same export
When HR and payroll work from different sources, the reconciliation meeting takes longer than the payroll run itself. The most common version of the failure looks like this.
- HR keeps balances in a vacation tracker.
- Payroll keeps balances in a payroll spreadsheet.
- Someone applies a balance correction in one system and forgets the other.
- Two months later, the year-end accrual snapshot is off by three days for one employee.
- HR and payroll spend an afternoon comparing line items to find the missing adjustment.
The bookkeeping export removes one of those copies. Payroll imports the CSV directly, the adjustments are already there as rows, and the carryover does not need to be recalculated by hand. The HR system stays the source of truth for balances and the payroll system stays the source of truth for what gets paid.
Permission-gated by design
Approved leave data and balance adjustments are sensitive. Not every HR user should be able to pull a payroll export. The bookkeeping export is permission-gated per company.
Companies define a role that can generate exports (typically the finance lead or the payroll administrator). Other HR users keep access to the rest of the app without seeing the export view. The same role permissions cover the audit log of exports, so the trail of who pulled which file is also scoped.
For agencies or multi-entity companies, the role can be scoped to specific companies inside the workspace. A finance lead for the German entity sees German exports. A finance lead for the US entity sees US exports. Nobody sees both unless the role is explicitly cross-entity.
How the export fits the monthly payroll routine
The standard payroll handoff looks the same in most teams we have seen. The bookkeeping export is built for that routine.
- Set the period. Pick the payroll period (usually the calendar month). The export window respects whatever cut-off date your payroll provider uses.
- Review the preview. The export view shows row counts per leave type, total adjustments, and the carryover entries that fall in the period. Anything that looks off is easier to fix before download than after the file lands in payroll.
- Download the CSV. The file lands with a stable column layout so saved mapping templates in your payroll system keep working from month to month.
- Import into the payroll provider. Personio, Factorial, Datev, Sage, Xero, ADP, or a payroll workbook all accept the CSV. There is no custom mapping required if you already have a template for any of these.
- Confirm the audit log entry. The export view shows the audit-log record for the file you just generated. Finance can reference that record during the end-of-month reconciliation.
Our companion checklist on the monthly payroll leave handoff walks through this in more detail, including the owners on each side and the cutoff times that tend to cause trouble.
Adjustments, corrections, and the audit trail
Most of the disagreements between HR and payroll come from balance adjustments that one side applied but the other did not see. The bookkeeping export treats adjustments as first-class rows.
A bonus gift day for a milestone, a correction after a leave-policy change, a one-off grant for a long sabbatical: each of these is a separate row in the CSV with the reason captured. The same data is written to the audit log so finance can trace the chain of approvals if the audit ever asks. Our deeper write-up on vacation adjustments in practice explains how to log them so the reason still makes sense six months later.
Pro tip
Set a convention for the adjustment reason field early. Free-text reasons drift over time and lose value during audits. A short controlled vocabulary (gift, correction, grant, sabbatical, parental) keeps the audit trail readable two years later.
Carryover, expiry, and partial periods
Carryover is where leave-to-payroll exports usually fall apart. The export treats carryover as a dated event on the rollover date, with a paired expiry row if your policy enforces an expiry date.
For a policy that allows five days carryover from 2025 into 2026 with a March 31 expiry, the 2026 January export shows five carryover days on January 1 plus the running balance. The April export shows any unused remainder expiring on March 31 as a negative balance adjustment with reason "carryover expiry." Payroll does not need to recalculate the cap.
Partial periods are handled the same way. A new hire joining mid-month has prorated entitlement, and the export reflects the entitled days for that partial period rather than rounding to the full month.
Where this export does not go
The bookkeeping export covers approved leave, balance adjustments, and carryover. It is not a replacement for payroll itself and it does not push data to your payroll provider on a schedule. You generate it on demand for the period you want, and you import it where it needs to go.
Custom payroll integrations (webhooks, scheduled pushes, direct provider sync) are not part of the bookkeeping export today. For teams that want a reporting view alongside the export, the Reports page covers utilization, trends, coverage, approvals, and country insights with its own CSV and PDF download. The two views answer different questions, and that separation is intentional.
If you are still evaluating whether you need a payroll-aware vacation tracker at all, the easiest sanity check is whether your finance lead currently re-types leave balances during the month-end close. If the answer is yes, this export is the piece that removes that step.
Frequently asked questions
Everything you might want to know before getting started. Still have questions? Reach out anytime.
A CSV of approved leave per period with employee identifiers, leave type, dates, day count, country, and balance adjustments. Carryover entries and manual adjustments appear as separate line items so payroll can reconcile what changed between two periods.
Each adjustment is its own row with a reason field, the adjusted day count, the user who applied it, and a timestamp. The same record is written to the audit log so finance can trace a balance change back to who made it and when.
Yes. The bookkeeping export is permission-gated per company. Only users with the relevant role can generate or download exports. The role can be scoped so finance leads see exports for their entities only.
The CSV is provider-agnostic. Teams import it into Personio, Factorial, Datev, Sage, Xero, ADP, or a payroll workbook with no custom integration. The column layout is stable so saved mapping templates keep working.
Carryover entries appear as dated line items in the period when they apply. If your company carries over five days from 2025 into 2026 with a March 31 expiry, the export shows the carryover entry on the carryover date and a separate row for any expired remainder.
Yes. Generating an export creates an audit log entry with the user, timestamp, period, and file hash. Finance reviews can use the audit log to confirm which version of the data went to payroll and who pulled it.
Pricing for payroll export
Bookkeeping and payroll export is included on paid plans. Teams of up to 10 on the free plan can use balance tracking and the Reports page; the payroll export is part of the paid tier because it is typically a finance-team requirement at that size.
Per-person pricing on the pricing page covers the export view, the permission gate, the audit-log integration, and unlimited period exports per company.
Getting started
If you are already a BreezeLeave customer, the export view is under Bookkeeping in the left navigation. Make sure the finance role is granted the export permission, set the period, review the preview, and download.
For deeper context on the leave-to-payroll handoff, the article on bookkeeping and payroll export for leave balances walks through the column layout, the reconciliation steps, and the patterns that go wrong when teams skip the audit log.