How to Record Payroll In Campfire (via Rippling)

Last updated: March 2, 2026

Overview

Periodically, based on your payroll payment cadence, Campfire generates journal entries using transformed structured data from Rippling based on your configured mappings. This article explains how to review and edit payroll runs from Rippling as journal entries in Campfire.

This article covers:

  • Payroll Mapping

  • Payroll Preview

  • Payroll Posting

Campfire automatically generates journal entries (payroll transactions) after each pay period. If department mappings are not updated before a payroll run, those journal entries may be generated with missing or incomplete information. This can occur when there are changes such as new employees, department updates, or other payroll changes that have not yet been mapped.

Campfire automatically generates journal entries (Payroll Transactions) after each payroll run. You can find these by going Settings > Connections > Rippling

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Payroll Mapping

Payroll Item Mapping ensures that each Rippling Payroll Item (e.g., Payroll Taxes, FICA)

is correctly mapped to its corresponding General Ledger account in Campfire.

To set up or update Payroll Item Mapping:

  1. Navigate to Settings > Connections > Rippling > Payroll Item Mapping

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  1. For each Rippling payroll item, confirm or update the following fields:

    1. Category

    2. Rippling Payroll Item

    3. Campfire Account

    4. Entity

  2. Click Sync Payroll Items to apply your changes

Department Mapping

Department Mapping bridges Rippling Departments and Teams with Campfire Departments, giving you more detailed visibility into your payroll costs.

  1. Navigate to Settings > Connections > Rippling > Department Mapping

  2. Confirm or update the following fields

    1. Rippling Department

    2. Rippling Team

    3. Campfire Department

  1. Click Resync Payroll to apply your changes

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Select Payroll to Preview (and Posting)

The Payroll Preview feature applies your Campfire mappings against your Rippling pay data to generate a draft view of the journal entry for the selected period. Use this to review the mappings at a more granular level to verify accuracy

  1. Click Preview > Select Entity (for desired Rippling Entity) > Select desired Pay Period and click Preview Selected Payroll to preview what the payroll run will look like based on your mappings

  2. Click Show Transformation Details to review each stage of processing:

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    1. Transformation Pipeline - At a high level, provides how the pay data was applied via mappings, aggregated, and eventually created as a journal entry where debits equal credits

    2. Mapping Rules - Shows the comparison of Rippling Departments and Teams into Campfire Departments

    3. Source Data - Shows you the detail Payroll data per employee

    4. Line Item Trace - This allows you to see in detail each journal entry line in detail (by source components

Because Campfire automatically generates payroll transactions, you will need to delete the auto-generated transaction and re-run the payroll sync to see your updated mappings reflected.

Do this by:

  1. Deleting the transaction you want updated

  2. Make your desired mapping updates

  3. Resync payroll

Your generated payroll transaction should now reflect your mapping updates