If you have ever justified personnel costs in a grant, or audited a client's payroll area, you know this reconciliation. Three documents telling the same story in three different ways. And a job that consists of proving that the three versions agree.
The three documents
The payslip. The worker's salary receipt. It carries the earnings, the social security contribution base, the withholdings and the net amount. It is what the company says it paid.
The RNT. The Relación Nominal de Trabajadores, the old TC2. The company files it every month with the Spanish Social Security through the RED system, and it details, worker by worker, the contribution bases, the days or hours contributed and the allowances or deductions applied. It comes with the RLC, the old TC1, which is the receipt for the total settlement. It is what the company declares to Social Security.
The IDC. The Informe de Datos de Cotización, issued by the Treasury. It records the conditions under which each worker contributes: contract type, contribution group, part time coefficient, registration dates and the peculiarities, such as allowances or temporary disability situations. It is what Social Security has on record.
How they are matched
The match is always per worker and per month. And it is three chained checks.
First, the base. The contribution base on the payslip has to match the base the company declared in that month's RNT for that worker. If it does not, something was accrued and not declared, or the other way round.
Second, the period. The registration days and the part time coefficient in the IDC have to be consistent with the period the payslip settles. A half time contract with a full time payslip does not match, no matter how well the bases agree.
Third, the cost. The employer cost is rebuilt by applying to the base the contribution rates the IDC dictates: common contingencies, unemployment, FOGASA, professional training and workplace accidents, minus the allowances the IDC itself accredits. That cost, added to the gross salary, is the personnel cost charged to a grant justification.
The RNT carries an electronic fingerprint and can be verified at the Social Security online office. For the granting body, the PDF issued by the system is the evidence. A screenshot is not.
Where it breaks
On paper it is simple. In practice it breaks in the usual places.
Prorated extra payments, which make the payslip gross and the RNT base look nothing alike at first sight. Collective agreement back pay, which lands in a different month than the one it belongs to. Temporary disability leaves, which move bases and change who pays what. The worker who is on the payroll but does not appear in that month's RNT. The allowances the IDC accredits and nobody deducted.
Each of those pieces is solved by looking at the right document. The problem is the volume: hundreds of workers, twelve months, three documents per cross check.
A few cents off on a single worker sinks the total and sends you looking for a needle in a haystack.
How Jeff does it
You hand Jeff the three blocks of documents as PDFs: payslips, RNT and IDC. No templates and no macros.
It extracts the data from each document. It pairs by worker and by month. It matches base against base, period against period, and rebuilds the employer cost with the IDC rates. What matches turns green. What does not turns red, with the reason next to it, for the auditor to look at.
And every figure stays traced to its origin. You click a contribution base in the working paper and it goes back to its payslip, its RNT page or its IDC box, with the highlight over the original data. If anyone asks where a number comes from, the answer is one click away.
The auditor stops typing bases into a spreadsheet and moves to reviewing exceptions. Which is, to be honest, the part of the job that does require judgment.
If your last close included weeks matching payroll against social security filings by hand, let's talk.
