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Menu Group: Maintenance
The pay period is the system road map, it defines each pay period throughout the year. You must set up pay periods before you can run a payroll cycle. We recommend that you set up all your pay periods for the entire year at the end of December. Work with a calendar to help you decide what event occurs in each period. Print the report to review your work and to make sure all the settings are correct. A wrong setting can wreak havoc with your payroll data and can incur considerable cost to repair.
Pay Period Numbers
Pay period numbers are seven digits in length; the first 4 represent the year, and the last 3 the period number. We recommend that you leave space between pay period numbers; this will allow for the possibility of adding more pay periods in the middle of the year. More pay periods can be added in the event you have an ad hoc pay run, for a vacation run or a bonus run for example. If you are running a weekly payroll the number sequence may look something like this:
2000010
2000020
2000030
2000040
..
..
2000520
In this case the first 4 digits represent the year, the next 2 represent the period (1-52), followed by a zero. This allows you to set-up up to 9 ad hoc runs in the middle of the year.
Clicking on the Add button will result in the following frame being displayed:
Enter the period number that you want to add and click OK.
The pay period set-up is divided into 3 frames for each period. A field by field definition follows each screen.
| Field | Description |
| Period Begin Date | Enter the starting date for your pay period. |
| Period End Date | Enter the ending date for your pay period. |
| Check Date | The check date that will show on the printed checks and direct deposit pay advice. |
| Cut Off Date | |
| Year | The year for the period. |
| Month | The month for the period. |
| Quarter | The quarter for the period. |
| Week of Month | The week in the month that the period occurs. For example the first period of the month would be 1, the second 2, etc. This number is used to selectively apply deductions based on which week of the month the current pay period is. |
| Month of Quarter | Which month of the quarter the current period occurs. Can be 1,2, or 3. |
| Month End | Check if this is a payroll month end. |
| Quarter End | Check if this is a quarter end. For the US this flag will control the printing of the 941 reports. |
| Year End | Check if this is a year end. Only once per year! |
These fields tell the system about the current periods' relationship to the fiscal year and period. If you choose to do a G/L interface in the pay period check the box. If you check the G/L Interface switch for all the pay periods then you will be interfacing to the G/L every pay period.
The Accrue Sick and Accrue Vacation switches tell the system to run the accrual batch procedures in the current pay period if you are using a hours per period type of accrual. If you are using a percentage based accrual then these switches have no relevance because a percentage based accrual must be executed for every pay run and is based on earnings. You will set this switch based on your vacation and sick pay plans. For example if your plans are designed to accrue 1 day per month for vacation or sick pay then you would want to click the box in the pay period that occurs in the proper day of the month. The analysis is done during the payroll gross to net calculation.
The Save Vacation box is used for jurisdictions where vacation pay is calculated using a fixed percentage (4, 6, or 8%) within Canada. The idea behind vacation pay is that the accrued amount is due to the employee only when he/she goes on vacation. The vacation will take place in the year following the accrual year. If your vacation year is from May 1, 1998 to April 30, 1999 then the accrual within that period will be paid out after April 30, 1999. After April 30, 1999 the accrual will start for the following year. At that point there are in fact 2 accrual amounts, one is called vacation due and the other is called termination due. The vacation due represents the amount accrued for the year prior to April 30, 1999 and the termination due represents the accruals after April 30, 1999. The terminology is important because in fact the after April 30,1999 amount is only due to the employee after April 30,2000. Between May 1,1999 and April 30,1999 the amounts are only due to the employee if he/she is terminated whereas the vacation amount is now due, hence it is called vacation due.
When does this shift take place? If your vacation period is the same as our example then you would click the box in that pay period. The current termination due bucket will then be accumulated to the vacation due bucket and the termination bucket will be cleared for the new year.
A Special Pay Run is used for pay runs where you want to exclude certain types of pay. For example, you may wish to produce a bonus pay run. You may not want only the bonus but not pay out regular pay. This presents no problem for hourly employees because you will not be posting any time for these employees. However, salaried employees are paid automatically, so you must tell the system not to pay salaried employees in the bonus run. To accomplish this you would set up a pay period as a bonus run by clicking this toggle box. Then you would tell the system which EBD's are to be excluded from the bonus run via EBD Maintenance. Other EBD's that you might need to suppress are once per week deductions or benefits.
The trigger frequency allows more that one run to be executed in the current period. If you are running a weekly payroll and have monthly employees also, then for the pay period that will run the monthlies enter a 12 in the trigger frequency bucket. If you have semi-monthly employees also then enter a 26 in the other bucket. You may also provide a different cheque/check date for the trigger frequency. Using these fields allows for the payment of 3 employee types in the same period.
This is not the only way to do multiple pay runs. There is another situation that arises quite frequently. That is, you have semi-monthly (24) and weekly employees but they are not paid on the same day. This means that you will have two pay runs for each pay period or 76 runs for the year (24 semi-monthly and 52 weekly). To accomplish this use the following settings:
Last updated October 20, 2006