🔓 Access level in Planday: Administrator

✅ Required steps: Payroll checklist - Steps to take before generating a payroll report

ℹ️ Important read: Payroll exports - FAQs and troubleshooting, How to customise your payroll report

Note: If you use the following payroll integrations, please refer to their specific guides:

Xero payroll (UK): Xero payroll integration
QuickBooks online: QuickBooks online integration - Setup guide with Planday
Sage 50 payroll: Set up Sage 50 payroll (formatted export)

What is a Payroll report?

A Payroll report in Planday summarises all the data you need to generate payroll, such as:

Approved shifts
Salaries or hourly pay rates
Pay supplements
Breaks (paid/unpaid)

Payroll reports can be generated at any time for a single employee, per Department, or for all active or deactivated employees.

Generating a report doesn’t change or modify any data in Planday and you can always download a PDF file to preview your data. Most businesses export payroll data at the end of a pay period or month.

How to make a Payroll report

Go to Planday web > Payroll > Payroll report

Here you can set your payroll interval, select employees, and choose download options for your report.

Select which Payroll interval to export

Pay periods: Select one or more pay periods to include. Choose Monthly, Fortnightly, Weekly or Four-weekly. By default, all will be included in your report.

Note: The pay periods you select determine which employee data is included in the report. See How to set a pay period to learn more.

Date interval: Choose a start and end date for the report.

Note: Planday will show a default monthly period. The day in the start date is based on the date you set in the standard settings for payroll report under Settings > Payroll > General.

Salaries:
- Calculate salary based on the date interval - The salaried employees' costs will be calculated based on the Date interval chosen and the salary amount set in the employee's profile, under the Employment tab.
- Ignore the date interval and pay salary in full for only one period - Salaries will be shown in full for a single pay period.

Select schedule data to include in your report

Departments: Choose All departments (default) or a specific department to filter your report.

Note: If specific departments are chosen, the report will only show hours worked within those departments. Hours worked in unselected departments will not be included, even if the employee worked there.

Employee types: Select All or filter by a specific employee type.
Employees: Choose whether to include All employees (default) or Specific employees.

Note: To refine your search, you can narrow down your results by selecting Specific employees and searching by name, salary identifier, or filtering by employee groups. Additionally, you can find employees who are no longer active but were part of a pay period by switching to the Deactivated employees section.

Set payroll report's download settings

Include Shifts: Choose whether to export Approved for payroll (default), Not approved for payroll or all shifts.
Sort report by: Select how to sort the exported data, for example, by Employee name, Salary Identifier, or Username.
File format: Choose your preferred export format, such as:
- CSV (semicolon separated)
- Microsoft Excel
- or any payroll integration file format that you have enabled in your workspace.
Include:
- Employee salaries: Adds salary information to your export.
- A preview of the exported file as a separate file: Creates a preview copy alongside the main export.
Preview format: To review the data or keep a record in a human-readable format, select Export preview as PDF or HTML.

When you’re ready, click Download report in the top right corner. Your payroll file will download according to your chosen settings.

Tip: To prevent discrepancies in worked hours, especially for employees with shifts overlapping a Daylight Saving Time (DST) change, review your payroll data for DST-affected dates before exporting. This can be best done by previewing the report as a PDF before exporting an Excel or CSV file.

See how payroll costs and hours are displayed in the Payroll report

PDF file layout

When you export your Payroll report as a PDF, the file includes two key parts:

Payroll summary (first page)
Employee breakdown (following pages)

Payroll summary (first page)

The PDF payroll summary shows the total of hours and costs per employee group, as well as the total of costs for the monthly salaried employees, including supplements and “various” hours.

Note: “Various” hours correspond to the hours that are paid but that are not counted towards the working hours, like “sick no pay” for example, or “Training” like in the example below.

Employee breakdown (following pages)

For each employee and within the selected date range, you’ll see:

(1.) a breakdown of the hours worked per day and their cost, and the breaks divided by employee group
- the breaks can be paid and unpaid. Learn more in How do the paid and unpaid breaks look like in the payroll report.
(2.) a summary with the total of hours and their cost, and the holiday and their cost and a breakdown of:
- the hours by supplements and meal deductions.
- the hours that are not included in the total of working hours (“various”)
- the hours corresponding to the breaks and their cost
- the hours corresponding to shift types

Note: The hour format is in decimals, not in h:mm. In the example above, the employee has worked 46.5 hours, which corresponds to 46 hours and 30 minutes.

Excel/CSV file layout

When you export your Payroll report as an Excel or CSV file, you can customise the data to fit your payroll needs or to match the needs of a third party payroll service.

Go to Settings > Payroll > Report format set-up > Payroll reports to:

Add or remove columns (for example, Salary code per hour type)
Define how worked hours are grouped or subdivided
Save your preferred default file settings for future exports

Learn more in How to customise your payroll exports article.

An example of CSV file will look like this:

Note: As in the PDF, the hour format in the CSV is also in decimals, not h:mm.

How to export a payroll report