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Payroll checklist — What to prepare before creating a payroll report
Payroll checklist — What to prepare before creating a payroll report

Follow these steps in preparation of your pay run to avoid mistakes before exporting a payroll report from Planday.

Patrick Gruhn avatar
Written by Patrick Gruhn
Updated over a week ago

🎯 For Admins that are using Planday payroll export file.

You can save a lot of time, and reduce the risk of error by pulling complete payroll reports from Planday. But before you start using payroll reports from Planday, we suggest going through the following checklist.


1. Are the Salary identifiers correct?

Make sure the salary identifier for all employees is correct. You can check or edit the salary identifier of a user by going to People > Employees > Edit user. The salary identifier is placed in the Personal details tab under the Payroll section.


Salary identifiers, also called payroll IDs, are used to identify each employee in a payroll system.


The identifier has to be the same in both Planday and the payroll system to ensure each employee gets their correct pay.


2. Make sure you have assigned a wage or a salary to each employee you want to pay


3. Any employee changes since the last time you did payroll?

If you add or edit employee data in Planday, you can pull a report to check for changes that should be updated in the payroll system as well.


You can pull a change report from Planday by going to People > Employees > Tools > Export data. Select Employee changes under report type and press Create report.


4. Register salary codes used in your payroll system

Salary codes are used in a payroll system to identify transactions such as normal hours, overtime, or hours with an additional allowance added to them.


If you do an export to your payroll system based on a file from Planday, each of the transactions in the file is usually associated with a salary code.

Click on this arrow to see where you can set up Salary codes on Planday for your different earning rates

  • The salary code for normal worked hours can be changed at Settings > Payroll > General > Salary codes

  • The salary code for supplements can be changed in Settings > Payroll > Payroll supplement > Edit the specific supplement

  • Salary codes can also be added to shift types from Settings > Schedule > Shift types

  • The salary code for employee groups can be changed in People > Employee groups > Edit the relevant employee groups.

Note: The salary codes set here will take precedence over those set in the General settings under Settings > Payroll > General.


5. Is everything approved in the schedule?

Before you create a payroll report in Planday, we recommend that you check that each shift is correct. You can mark it as 'approved' and generate a report including only approved shifts. When browsing through your schedule, look out for any shifts that have any colour other than green.

Green indicates that the shift is approved.

Go to Schedule > Tools > Shifts overview for a faster way to check, how many approved or unapproved shifts there are.

Note: If this is your first payroll report, take some additional time to review the shifts and make sure paid and unpaid breaks are accounted for and shift times are correct.

When you've gone through the checklist, you can pull payroll reports from Payroll > Payroll export.


6. Are all leave requests for that pay period approved or denied?

To check all leave requests, go to Schedule > Leave requests (or Absence requests) > Adjust the Period to the pay period you want the payroll report for and choose the status Pending (it should be the default one) and see which requests require action. Learn more in How to approve or decline leave requests from employees.

If you have any leavers and you must pay their remaining holiday balance, follow the steps below:

  • Go to Schedule > Leave accounts (or Absence accounts)

  • Set the dates in the Period filter from the start of the accruing period to the day the employee is deactivated

  • Choose All in Account status

  • Click on Filters and choose the holiday account

  • Click on Export

The final column Leave pay - at the end day of the period filter in the export will give you the amount to pay. It’s advised to delete their future holiday in order to get an accurate figure of the accrued leave that they are owed in their final pay.


Next:

How to make a report using Payroll export


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