Payroll – Period Closing and Locking

When the month ends, the payroll period must be reviewed, approved, locked and sent on. The order matters: locking is what makes the figures authoritative, and several export routes require it to be done already.

Month-end checklist

Most common is the last business day of the month, or according to your own payroll routine. The rule of thumb is to close when you are certain no more punches, break adjustments or absence requests affect the period.

Some restaurants close only on the fifth of the following month to allow for late corrections. That works just as well — the lock can be set at any time.

Steps 1–3: review the source data

Time reports. Open Personal ▸ Tider and go through the period. Look especially for forgotten clock-outs, unusually long shifts and missing breaks. Approve row by row or for the whole employee.

Unapproved time blocks both locking and the payroll file. It is included in the data — excluding it would have caused silent underpayment — but the file cannot be created until the time is approved.

Absence. All pending requests with dates inside the period should have a decision. Remember that sick and childcare notifications are approved instantly and never sit waiting — there is nothing to decide there, only to check that the type is right.

Tips. Close the tip period and approve the distribution. A calculated but unapproved tip period gives everyone SEK 0 in tips in payroll, PAXml, AGI, FORA and SIE — you would have seen a finished distribution on screen that does not exist in payroll. Vendion warns if there is an unapproved period ending in the month.

Steps 4–6: approve the rows and run the reconciliation

Click each employee for the day-by-day breakdown and check the items that usually vary: the supplement buckets, sick days with the qualifying deduction, vacation days, childcare leave, meal deductions, the tip share and any manual adjustments.

Then approve row by row or with Godkänn alla (approve all). The status goes Ej godkänd → Godkänd → Utbetald (not approved → approved → paid).

Approval is bound to the row's amount. If something changes afterwards the row is flagged as changed and export is blocked until you approve again.

Run the reconciliation. Click Kör avstämning (run reconciliation). Vendion compares its own outputs for the same month — the screen, the SIE file, the PAXml file and the AGI and FORA files — and reports how many checkpoints agree.

A red checkpoint stops both locking and every export. The same applies if the reconciliation could not be run at all: silence must not be read as approval.

You can proceed anyway, but you must state why, and the reason is logged.

Step 7: lock the payroll period

The button is called Lås löneperioden and is disabled until all rows are approved.

What locking does: the figures are stored as they looked at the moment of locking, and it is that frozen version PAXml, Fortnox, AGI, FORA and SIE read — not the live figures. At the same time, changes to time entries in the locked month are blocked. The page clearly shows Löneperioden är låst with a timestamp.

Locking is blocked if there is unapproved time, if any row is not approved, or if the reconciliation is red. If the lock status cannot be read, the period is not locked — deliberately, since locking data nobody could verify is worse than not locking at all.

If anyone is missing an employment number you get a warning. It does not block — the number can be filled in on the staff record even after locking.

Steps 8–9: export, send and verify

Now, and not before, it is time to send the data on.

• Skicka till Fortnox Lön — the data goes straight into Fortnox, no file to carry. Requires a locked period
• PAXml — the payroll file for Fortnox Lön or Visma Lön
• SIE — only if you are not sending the data to a payroll system, otherwise the salary is posted twice
• AGI file to the Swedish Tax Agency and FORA file to FORA
• CSV for your own processing

If you export an unlocked period the file is marked PRELIMINARY and you get a warning. Avoid it — a preliminary file imported for real is hard to undo.

Every export appears under Exporthistorik with format, period, timestamp and who exported it.

Verify afterwards. Check that salary, social contributions and the vacation liability are posted to the right accounts, and that the total in Vendion matches the total in the payroll system. Reconcile against the bank file once salaries have gone out. If you are unsure about the account structure, take it up with your accountant.

Employment certificates are not produced here. The law requiring them was repealed on 1 October 2025, and the unemployment funds now take income data directly from the employer declaration at individual level — that is, from the AGI file you have already exported. If a fund still needs a certificate, you fill it in at arbetsgivarintyg.nu.

If you find an error afterwards

• If you have not exported yet: click Lås upp (unlock), fix the error and lock again. Unlocking requires the edit-payroll permission and is confirmed in a dialog. The lock record is preserved — the evidence of what was exported does not disappear.
• If you have already sent the data on: post the correction in the next period as a correction with a clear note. Changing data that has already left means Vendion and the payroll system show different figures for the same month.

Unlocking and re-locking are told apart in Lönehistorik (payroll history), together with who did what and when.

Common pitfalls

• Forgotten clock-outs in the last week — go through the end of the month extra carefully
• An unapproved tip period — gives everyone zero tips, silently, in every file
• Exporting before locking — the file is marked PRELIMINARY
• Both PAXml and SIE for the same month — posts the salary cost twice
• Supplement rates changed mid-month — check that the rates applied on the days they should
• Staff without an employment number — they are left out of the PAXml file