Manage Payroll Definitions

When you create or modify payroll definitions, the application generates a calendar of payroll periods based on your selections.

The choices you make for these values determine the resulting schedule of payroll periods:

• Effective start date

• First period end date

• Number of years

• Offsets

• Changes to specific dates

Effective Start Date

The effective start date is the first date that the payroll definition is available for employee data. You must set the start date as on or before the earliest date of any historical data that you want to load.

For example, for a payroll starting on 01-JAN-2013 with five years of historical payroll data to load, you set the start date of the payroll definition to 01-JAN-2008.

The effective start date doesn't affect the generated calendar of payroll periods. The start date for the first payroll period is based on the first period end date.

First Period End Date

The first period end date is the end date of the first payroll period that the application generates for a payroll definition. The first period end date is typically based on the date of implementation, tax year, benefits enrollments, or a particular payment cycle. For example, if your weekly payroll work week is Saturday through Friday, and your first payment date is on 06-JAN-2012, you could use 30-DEC-2011 as your first period end date.

Number of Years

The number of years you enter represents how many years of time periods to generate starting from the beginning of the first payroll period, which is determined by the first period end date. This table shows an example for a semimonthly payroll definition.

Effective Start Date	First Period End Date	Number of Years	Generated Time Periods
01-JAN-2014	15-JUN-2014	5	01-JUN-2014 to 31-MAY-2018

Once you save a payroll definition, you can later only increase but not reduce its number of years because a calendar of time periods for the payroll was already generated.

Note: The application generates the calendar of payroll periods in increments of ten or fewer years. For example, if you want a 12-year calendar of payroll periods, you first enter 10 years and submit your changes. Then you edit the payroll definition setting the number of years to 12.

Offsets

Depending on the payroll period type, you can elect for your payroll cycle events to occur on specific dates, or to have the application calculate dates based on offsets from period start or end dates.

Use this table to understand the predefined payroll cycle events that you can offset.

Date	Meaning
Cutoff Date	Final date that payroll information can be entered for the payroll period.
Payslip Availability Date	Date on which payees can view payslips.
Payroll Run Date	Date used by payroll calculation processes to retrieve effective values such as employee details. The process date, if provided when submitting a payroll process, overrides this value. This date is predefined for your country or territory and is typically based on either date earned or date paid that payroll calculation uses as the process date.
Date Earned	Date on which the application processes element entries for the payroll run. The date earned must be within the effective dates of the payroll period.
Date Paid	Date the employee is marked as paid. This is the date used for tax purposes. For check payments, this is the date that the check is valid for cash or deposit. For electronic funds transfer (EFT) payments, it's the transfer date.
Planned Submission Date	Date to inform the payroll administrator or payroll manager on the planned date to submit the payroll run for each payroll period.

When creating a payroll definition, you can use dynamic offsets for payroll cycle events. You can use support dynamically generated dates for offsets for all the predefined payroll time periods . Using dynamic offsets, you can offset each payroll cycle event by a specified number days before or after the start or end date, as shown here:

Offset Day Types	Offset Value	Base Date Values
Number of work days Number of calendar days	Before After	Period Start Date Period End Date

For example, you might want to set the cutoff date three work days before the payroll end date. This offset accommodates differences in the number of days in the payroll period and also accounts for weekends and holidays.

The predefined Monthly (Calendar) payroll time period supports using both dynamic offsets and fixed-date offsets. Using fixed dates, you can adjust the exact date of each of the payroll cycle events for the first payroll period. Any adjustments that you make are reflected in the payroll calendar for subsequent payroll time periods. For example, if you set the cutoff date as the 25th of the month, then all payroll periods in the calendar will have those offsets.

Specific Date Adjustments

Once you generate the payroll time periods, you can further adjust any specific calendar dates, as needed. For example, if you know of a particular bank holiday that falls on a payment date, you might want to adjust the dates manually on the payroll calendar's time period. You can make these adjustments when creating a payroll definition or any time after then, as long as the time period is in the future. Adjust the dates of an existing time definition on the Time Periods tab on the Manage Payroll Definitions page.