Overview of 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
The effective start date is the first date that the payroll definition is available for employee data. The start date must be 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.
Ledger
You can select a primary ledger that will be used for payroll costing. The ledger determines the accounting information, such as, the chart of accounts and the accounting calendar.
Suspense and Default Accounts
You can associate accounts to the payroll definition that will be used by the payroll costing process for suspense and default accounting purposes.
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.
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.
This table describes the predefined payroll cycle events that you can offset.
|
Date |
Meaning |
|---|---|
|
Cutoff Date |
Final date that payroll information is entered for the payroll period. This date is for information purposes only. Your departments, such as HR, may need this payroll deadline to submit information that affects the payroll run |
|
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. For check/cheque payments, this is the date that the check/cheque 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. |
Dynamic Offsets
When you create a payroll definition, you can use dynamic offsets for payroll cycle events. All of the predefined payroll time periods you can use support dynamically generated dates for offsets. Use dynamic offsets to offset each payroll cycle event by a specified number of days before or after the start or end date.
Fixed-Date Offsets
The predefined Monthly (Calendar) payroll time period supports both dynamic offsets and fixed-date offsets. Use fixed date to 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. Make these adjustments when you create 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.