As part of getting set up for US payroll, you'll be required to add pay schedules for your employees. You’ll need to decide on the following:
Pay frequency: weekly, every other week, twice per month, or monthly.
Pay date: When payments land in the employees' bank accounts.
Pay period: The time period associated with the pay.
If you want payroll to be approved manually or automatically.
Salaried employees
The most common pay schedules for salaried employees are:
Twice per month, with paydays on the 15th and the last day of the month. The pay periods would be the 1st to the 15th and the 16th to the last day of the month.
Every other week, with paydays on Mondays or Fridays. If your pay date is Monday, the pay period would be the previous Monday to Sunday. If your pay date is Friday, the pay period would be the previous Saturday to Friday.
The compensation for salaried employees doesn’t change every period, so it is easiest to auto-approve their compensation. If nothing needs to change, payroll just runs automatically each pay period. If you need to make any changes, like adding a bonus, you just need to do that before the approval deadline.
Hourly employees
Admins need to input hours for hourly workers each payroll period. Because you may not have the hours recorded/approved until the last day of the pay period, it is common to set up a pay schedule with a pay date in arrears, i.e., several days after the end of the pay period.
Hourly employees are often on a weekly or every-other-week pay schedule to make it easier to account for overtime hours.
Let’s say that you are using an every-other-week pay schedule and have a 4-day processing period.
You could define a two-week pay period from Monday to Sunday, with a payday the following Friday.
This gives you time to input and approve all hours by the approval deadline on Monday. If you have 2-day processing, you would have until Wednesday to approve payroll.
On the other hand, if you moved the pay date earlier to align with the end of the period, you might have to estimate hours and/or adjust the next pay period with the actual hours. Note that this adds extra complexity and administration, which should be avoided.
It is also common to require payroll approval for hourly workers so you can explicitly review or input hours as part of the process. You can still auto-approve the payroll for hourly workers, but any hours you input would require re-approval. Hourly workers with 0 hours in the period are skipped automatically.
Configuration
Use the Pay schedules page to configure your pay schedule(s). You can use one pay schedule for multiple employees and/or contractors.
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