Payroll Pay Periods vs. Pay Frequencies

Problem:

Ran payroll this morning- system has stopped taking deductions like medical insurance out of paychecks and does not know why or what to do about it. This is the first run it has happened with (first one of the New Year). He does not run another until Thursday. It appears the actual withholdings are okay, but things coming out like child support and insurance are not.

CAUSE:

this is a problem with the Pay Period Names that we give and the pay frequencies.

there are 9 pay periods. (User-defined description)

there are 8 pay Frequencies hard-coded in AGRIS.

Most people mimic the pay frequency title with the pay periods description which helps make it more confusing.

but if you start out a new payroll, you must pick a PAY PERIOD, even if you later flag the pay frequency default to that PAY PERIOD to pick up periods you don't have defaulted in payroll setup.

Just because you tell it to pick up semi-monthly PAY FREQUENCY, that is not the same thing as telling it to grab the deductions in the semi-monthly PAY PERIOD.

It would be better to have titles like FRIDAY PAY PERIOD & 15/30TH PAY PERIOD instead of using the same words as the hard-coded pay frequency.

so, what I believe happened is his semi-monthly pay frequency employees (15/30th pay period) were only flagged for that deduction on that pay period.

they started out a payroll with WEEKLY PAY PERIOD (1 of 9 of the frequencies) and the deductions were only flagged for the 2nd PAY PERIOD which they call SEMI-MONTHLY (which would be better to rename to 15/30th pay period) So no deductions would be included.

workaround:

rename your PAY PERIODS to something other than the words used by PAY FREQUENCY. Example:

2. Flag the deductions to YES for all PAY PERIODS, again to minimize confusion.

Created by Alisa Mueller 1/5/2022