How to close Payroll by Period?

Managing payroll is a crucial task that demands precision and efficiency. This article will guide you through the process and strategies needed to seamlessly prepare and run your payroll for specific date ranges.

Whether you are working with monthly, bi-weekly, or customised pay cycles, building a solid understanding of how these timeframes affect payroll calculations is essential for maintaining control over labour costs and ensuring your employees are paid correctly.

Essential Checks Before You Close Payroll by Period 

1. Before you can close your payroll for the week, you must ensure the information in the Week Details screen is correct and up to date. Please review this information carefully before proceeding to the next step. 
   ➡️ For help updating the Week Details Screen, click here! 
2. Ensure that you have set any leavers for this week before proceeding with the next steps. The leaving date can only be set in an open payroll in the last two weeks. This will create a holiday, bank holiday and lieu shifts to pay out any balances. 
   ➡️ For help setting your employee as a leaver, please click here! 
3. Once you are satisfied with the hours and additional payments being paid out for those weeks for your employees you will need to ensure that the overall daily sign-off has been completed for each day of the date period . You can see an overview of this on the Sign-Off Monitor. 
   ➡️ For help using the Sign-Off Monitor, click here! 

Steps to Process Payroll and Close Out the Weeks

• Once your daily sign-off has been completed in full for the weeks in the payroll period, you will need to navigate to "Payroll by Period" using the mega menu search bar. 

• Here you will be able to generate date period payroll files. You will see two reminders under the payroll by date period header. One is to remind you to ensure the overall sign-off has been completed and the second will display when the last payroll was closed, by whom with a time and date stamp for your reference. 

• Now to generate the payroll file. First, you will need to set the Start and End Dates of the payroll period using the date picker. 

• Once this has been entered clock on "Download Timesheet Audit". This file will show all hours worked/rostered and to be sent to payroll. 
  
  
• You have an option to download a payroll export preview file, if applicable. This is only a preview for reference and will not close the payroll. 
• Once you are happy with the data on the timesheet audit, you can proceed to generate the Payroll Export file, once generated this will close the payroll for the period. 
• Download the payroll export file. Do NOT open the file as it may alter the data and leading zeros will be removed from the file. 

• Follow the steps in Payroll Software to finalise payroll for your site. 
• Lastly, best practice would be to download the Cost Analysis Report so that you can see the costs of what you've transferred over.