If you need to change your pay schedule, follow the steps in this article. This may be to:
- Add/remove departments
- 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 #
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.
Steps #
- Setup > Pay Schedules: Click Update to edit the schedule, then clear the Enabled checkbox and click Update. This will temporarily suspend the schedule’s usage and allow you to make edits.
- 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.
- Finally, re-enable the schedule by clicking the Enabled checkbox and clicking Update
- 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
Your schedule has been updated, and a newly dated pay run is ready.
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: You should always pick the intended day or the contractual day. Do not try to adjust for weekends and working days; this will automatically be 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 next month for the working days for the entire previous month. The payday pattern should be Day after month start, 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:
