If you need to change your pay schedule, follow the steps in this article. This may be to:
- Add/remove departments
- Switch a worker from one department to another
- Add/ remove workers (via their department) – to resolve the error “has no pay items. Hint: restore items or remove worker from schedule“
- Change dates
Overview #
Pay Schedules and Departments #
Workers are included in a pay schedule via their department. Therefore, each schedule allows you to explicitly add or remove departments, specifying which workers are included in the pay schedule and which are not. For example, a test worker in a test worker department can be excluded by ensuring that the test worker department is not included in the pay schedule.
In the example below, the m1 monthly schedule applies to all departments except Weekly:
Pay Items #
Workers’ pay items are all specified by a frequency. If you need to switch pay items and frequency. The system will do this automatically as long as the old and new departments, as well as the older new pay schedules, have been set up such that the system can confirm the old department frequency and the new department frequency. In the example below, the system recognises that the m1 department operates on a monthly schedule and the w1 department operates on a weekly schedule, based on the schedule. If you attempt to switch a worker from Department w1 to m1 and they have weekly pay items for w1, all of these Pay Items will be automatically updated for you.
| Frequency | Department | Schedule |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | m1 | m1 |
| Weekly | w1 | w1 |
Steps #
As the steps below cover many different cases, some steps may not be applicable.
- The first step is to ensure you have all the required departments, including old and new departments. If you want to move a worker from a weekly to a monthly schedule, ensure you have a weekly department, e.g., w1, as well as a monthly department, e.g., m1. Do not attempt to delete any old departments at this step.
- If you need to add a new Pay Schedule Setup > Pay Schedules: Click Add… and see the next section for details on how to set up a new schedule
- If you need to update an existing Pay Schedule Setup > Pay Schedules: Click Update to edit the schedule, Then, Update the same schedule to make the required changes.
- If you need to amend departments, carefully enlarge the department window (pull down from the bottom right-hand corner) and use CTRL-click on a PC or Command-click on MacOs to add or remove any departments to the selected list. If you accidentally click the wrong department and/or lose the previously multi-selected list, don’t update – instead, hit back and then go in to update the pay schedule again to try and preserve the selected ones.
- Make any other changes to the pay schedule as required.
- Check the dates in the table at the bottom of the page
- Please note, as per HMRC, that you should keep the same contracted pay date each month, even if it falls on a weekend (or non-banking day), because you are allowed to pay employees on the previous working day.
- Do not delete any unused schedules at this stage.
- At this stage, you should have all old and new departments and Pay Schedules.
- If applicable, you can switch workers from their old department to their new department. As long as the software can detect that the old department was designated with a certain pay frequency according to the schedule and the current pay items have the same frequency, it will then switch all the pay items to the new frequency.
- If the pay run is running, select Pay runs > Redo the scheduled pay run. You will now have the same scheduled run on the new date. After a few seconds, delete the old pay run.
- If the pay run is not running, then see this article here to start it off
- Once everything has been set up and is working correctly, you can then delete any unused departments by renaming them to delete, cannot be undone and also any unused Pay Schedules.
Your schedule has been updated, and a newly dated pay run is ready.
Pay Schedule examples #
Monthly pay schedules are specified using two patterns:
- The first pattern is how the pay days repeat – the day on which you will make the payment
- And the second pattern is how the pay period repeats, the pay period is the days worked
Note: Always select the intended day or the contractual day. Do not attempt to adjust for weekends and working days; this will be automatically done for you in the bank file. The payday in the FPS should always be the same, even if it falls on a weekend.
Example 1: A typical monthly scenario would have the payday and pay period as the last day of the month, so in this case, both patterns would be Day before month end. This tells the software you always want those days to be counted back from the end of the month.
Example 2: Pay on the 5th of the following month for the working days of the entire previous month. The payday pattern should be the Day after the start of the month, because it is 5 days after the start of the month. But the pay period pattern would be the last day of the month before, and would be Day before month end:
