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ℹ️ Important read: How to make a report using payroll export ; Define a start date for your organisation’s recurring Pay periods
✅ Required steps:How to create and edit employees
What is a pay period?
The pay period determines how often the employee will be paid both hourly and fixed salaries.
Setting up Pay periods for your employees can be used for two things:
To process payroll
When processing your payroll from Payroll > Payroll export, you can select which pay periods to include in your report.
To allow correct accrual calculation
Pay periods are used to ensure correct calculation of hours for the UK 2024 12.07% accrual method.
For holiday years starting on or after 01 April 2024, the correct method to calculate holiday entitlement for irregular and part time workers is to calculate holiday in hours rather than weeks. Holiday accrues on the last day of each Pay period, at the rate of 12.07% of the actual hours worked in that Pay period, rounded to the nearest whole number of hours.
Learn more in How to set up the UK 2024 accrual method.
You can set a pay period for each employee by going to People > Edit employee > Employment > Pay periods. The default pay period is Monthly, which is pre-selected for all your employees unless you change it.
Which pay period should you set?
You probably already have a pay period that works for your business and your region’s market requirements. Besides the default Monthly option, Employees may prefer to be paid more frequently on a weekly or fortnightly schedule giving them quick budgeting possibilities. However, it can be time-consuming to have to run payroll at a more frequent interval if you have many employees.
You have the following options to choose from when setting a pay period:
Monthly - (default) - Employees get their hourly salary calculated for the month or earn a fixed income. This option is suitable for fixed-salaried employees.
Fortnightly - also known as bi-weekly or every other week pay period. Employees get their hourly salary calculated for two weeks. This option is suitable for hourly paid employees.
Weekly - You can use this to pay your hourly or fixed-salaried employees on a weekly basis.
Four-weekly - You can choose this option if you pay your employees after four weeks (as opposed to every calendar month). This option is suitable for hourly paid employees.
How to set or change an employee’s pay period?
While choosing a pay period when starting a new business may be easy, changing to a new period for existing employees can also be accomplished very quickly.
You can change an employee’s pay period by navigating to People > Employees > click the name of the employee and press Edit > go to Employment tab > scroll down to the Pay period section.
When changing a pay period, you must specify when that pay period should come into effect. Set this by selecting a future date under Valid from. The change will go into effect from 00:00 of the selected day.
How to set or change an employee’s Salary?
You can set or change an employee's salary by navigating to People > Employees > click the name of the employee and press Edit > go to Employment tab > scroll down to the Salary section > press Edit salary.
Exporting specific pay periods in Payroll export
To process your payroll for specific pay periods, go to Payroll > Payroll export page.
Here you can choose a pay period by deselecting the ones you don't need depending on your payroll need. Select a Date interval to prepare your report.
From the Payroll export page, press Prepare report and export your information by pressing the Download PDF button. You can use this PDF to see if the data looks good before exporting a CSV or an integration-specific report.
Example payroll report
The following payroll report shows an employee with a weekly pay period and a fixed salary of ￡1000 distributed over 37.5 hours.
When running a report from 20/06/2022-30/6/2022, you can see the Pay period for an entire week between (20/06/2022 until 26/06/2022) with a payout of ￡1000 and a split as the date interval ends before the end of the Pay period (27/06/2022 until 30/06/2022) with a payout of ￡571.34.
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