Review what your accountant sends and ask the right question

Reading time: about 9 minutes

The situation. Every month your accountant’s email arrives with the payroll and social-security summary. You skim it, the total looks like last month’s, and you sign it off. You have done this for years.

This case is not about distrusting your accountant — who is probably doing a good job — but about the fact that the final responsibility is yours and today you are signing something you do not fully understand. The goal is not to correct them: it is to be able to ask one specific question when something does not add up.

What you need to hand: The month’s summary, and the version without names. A payslip carries name, ID number, social-security number and sometimes garnishments or maintenance payments: it is among the most sensitive data in a pharmacy. This case is done with the figures, not with the PDF as it arrives.

Step by step

Strip the names before anything else

Open the summary and copy it into a blank document, replacing each name with "Employee 1", "Employee 2". Delete ID numbers, social-security numbers, bank details and addresses.

To understand why an employer cost is what it is you need none of those: you need the category, the contract hours, the gross and the contribution bases. If something is not needed for the calculation, it goes.

Three minutes, and non-negotiable. In a small pharmacy the payroll data of four people identifies four people even without names, so also do not paste the whole list if you can avoid it: ask about the line that bothers you.

Ask it to translate it, line by line

The first step is not hunting for errors: it is understanding. An accountant’s summary has fifteen line items and most owners recognise four.

Act as somebody explaining a Spanish payslip to me without assuming I
know any of this. Here is one month’s summary, WITHOUT NAMES.

Paste the figures here

I want:
1. What each line item is, in one sentence and in plain language.
2. Which ones the employee pays (deducted from gross) and which ones the
   employer pays ON TOP of gross.
3. The TOTAL employer cost this month, and how much is pay and how much
   is social security.

One important thing: this is a pharmacy, covered by the Spanish national
collective agreement for pharmacies. If any line looks like it belongs to
a different sector, tell me instead of accepting it.

If you need a figure to explain a line, ask me. Do not assume it.

Check the 6.48% on a calculator

There is one check you can do yourself in thirty seconds that catches most discrepancies: what is deducted from the employee for social security.

In 2026 it is 6.48% of the contribution base, split as: 4.70% common contingencies, 1.55% unemployment, 0.10% vocational training and 0.13% for the intergenerational equity mechanism.

Take the contribution base from one payslip, multiply by 0.0648 and compare with the sum of that payslip’s social-security deductions. If it does not match, you have your question — a specific question, with a number, which is exactly what gets a quick answer from an accountant.

Careful: income tax withholding is not part of that 6.48%. It is a separate percentage, depends on each employee’s personal circumstances, and there is no "correct" figure to compare it against.

And if you want the full monthly breakdown done against the agreement tables, this site already does it: the payroll calculator and the employer-cost tool exist precisely for this — they are in Spanish, because the agreement is — and nothing needs to be handed to any model.

Compare two months and ask about what moved

A single month says little. Two consecutive months say plenty: anything that changed without a cause you know about is a question.

Here is the same summary for TWO consecutive months, without names.

MONTH 1: ...
MONTH 2: ...

Tell me:
1. Which items changed and by how much, in euros and as a percentage.
2. For each change, the POSSIBLE causes (agreement increase, back pay,
   sick leave, a change of hours, a pro-rated bonus payment, a seniority
   increment, a change in tax withholding…).
3. Which of those changes have NO obvious explanation in the data itself.

For point 3, write me the exact questions I would put to my accountant.
Short, with the number in them, and in a normal tone: I am not accusing
anybody, I want to understand it.

Send one question, not five

Here is the difference between this helping you and isolating you. An email with twelve AI-generated queries reads to your accountant like an audit, and the relationship cools. One specific question with a number in it gets answered in ten minutes and teaches you something.

Pick the one that bothers you most. And if the answer convinces you, that is it: there is nothing to win.

And one thing worth more than the rest of this case: sometimes you get the explanation and it still does not add up for you. That does not mean your accountant is wrong — it means a figure is missing that you have and they do not, or the reverse. That conversation is this case’s real outcome.

A full example, and what is wrong with it

One month’s summary, without names, with the step 2 prompt. This is the part of the translation that matters.

What it replies

"What the employee pays (deducted from gross): common contingencies 4.70%, unemployment 1.55%, vocational training 0.10%, intergenerational mechanism 0.13%. Total 6.48% of the contribution base.

What the employer pays (on top of gross): common contingencies 23.60%, unemployment 5.50%, wage guarantee fund 0.20%, training 0.60%, intergenerational mechanism 0.67%, plus the occupational accident rate for the activity.

Total employer cost for the month: €8,412.55, of which €6,310.20 is pay and €2,102.35 social security.

Note: the "pharmacist supplement" line appears specific to the pharmacy sector and corresponds to the supplement in the national pharmacy agreement."

And now, what is wrong with that reply:

The 6.48% is right, and it is the only thing you can check yourself. It matches the agreement and this site’s calculator: 4.70 + 1.55 + 0.10 + 0.13. Take the contribution base from one payslip, multiply by 0.0648 and compare with that payslip’s social-security deductions. Thirty seconds, and it catches most discrepancies.
The employer rates came from memory, not from your document. And employer rates change every year, sometimes mid-year. The model gave you the ones it has read most often, which need not be your month’s. If you are going to use that figure for anything, check it against the official social-security statement, not the chat.
It left the accident rate without a figure, and rightly so. "According to the activity" is the correct answer: it depends on the classification you are registered under and it cannot know. That is the behaviour you want and it is worth recognising when it appears — a model that says "I do not know" where it cannot know is more useful than one that fills in.
And the €8,412.55 breakdown was not calculated: it was copied. If that figure was in your summary, fine. If it was not and it composed it by adding, check it, because adding thirty lines of a pasted table is exactly where one goes missing. Same rule as the sales case: the total is the first thing you verify.

The point of this case is not to catch anybody out: it is that after reading it you know what the seven lines you have been signing for years are, and you can do a thirty-second check you could not do before.

And the normal outcome is that everything adds up. That is information too: the next time something does not, you will see it — which is exactly what did not happen before.

And if your pharmacy is not like that

If the month includes a sick leave. It is the month this exercise most deserves, because that is where errors concentrate: the first days unpaid, then one rate, then another, and the agreement top-up only in the cases that provide for it. Tell it there is a leave and from which day, or it will explain a normal payslip that is not the one in front of you.

If the month includes a final settlement. That is not a payslip and is not reviewed this way. For a final settlement this site has a calculator with the agreement tables inside, which beats any explanation from a model: it gives you the parts and you can check them line by line.

If you have somebody on a training or apprenticeship contract. The rates and reliefs are different and it is where mistakes most easily slip through. Tell it exactly which contract type it is, by name. And if something does not add up, that is the good question for your accountant — specific, with the contract named and with the figure you got.

If what you want is to forecast the cost of hiring somebody. That is a different case and this site does it without uploading anything: the employer-cost tool starts from the agreement and gives you the real total. Use it for the figure and the chat to understand where each part comes from — in that order, not the reverse.

When it does not work first time

I cannot tell which figure is the contribution base in my summary.

It usually appears as "common contingencies base" and it is NOT the gross: it includes the pro-rata share of extra payments, so it is nearly always higher than the month’s salary. If you cannot find it, that is already a legitimate question for your accountant and it gets answered in two lines.

The income tax withholding looks enormous.

There is nothing to compare it against and the model has nothing either: it depends on each employee’s personal circumstances and there is no "correct" figure. The one thing you can look at is whether it changed against last month with nothing else changing, and that is a question.

I am worried my accountant will take it badly.

That is why step 5 says one question, not a list. A specific doubt with a number in it reads as interest; twelve doubts generated at once read as an audit. And if the explanation convinces you, it ends there: there is nothing to win.

I want to do it but anonymising four payslips takes a while.

Do not upload them all: take one, the one that raises most doubts, and clean only that. One is enough to understand the line items, and four teach you nothing new. The two-month comparison does need the summary, but there what you paste are the aggregate figures, not the payslips.

Before you use what it gave you

You pasted no names, ID numbers or social-security numbers.
You checked the 6.48% on a calculator against at least one payslip.
You did not compare the tax withholding against any "correct" figure, because there is none.
You can tell what the employee pays from what the employer pays.
You are going to send one specific question, not a list.

It gives contribution rates from another year or country. Social-security rates change and the model mixes years without warning. The 2026 figure of 6.48% comes from the Spanish agreement and from this site, not from the model: check it against the agreement tables, not against the chat.

It confuses the pharmacy agreement with another. Some items — the pharmacist supplement, seniority increments, the "on account of the agreement" top-up — belong to this sector and the model reads them as general retail. That is why the prompt names the agreement and asks it to flag oddities.

It encourages you to argue. Ask it to review a payslip and it will find something to say even when everything is right: it is built to answer. Move from "this is an error" to "I do not understand this" before writing the email. It is nearly always the latter.

It confuses the contribution base with the gross. It is the commonest conceptual error here, and because the two numbers look similar, the explanation still sounds coherent. If it is calculating percentages on the gross rather than on the base, every amount comes out low. Say explicitly which figure is which in the first message.

Now, with your own. Do just the 6.48% step with the last payslip you have to hand. It is the thirty-second check most people should be doing and almost nobody does. If it matches, you know something you did not; if it does not, you have a question with a number in it.

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