"Pay Period Closing" is an option to prevent unintended time card changes and mitigate any data disparity between ExakTime and your accounting/payroll software such as editing time records or adding new time records after the time cards have been finalized for payroll.
Table of Contents
- What Closing a Pay Period Does
- Enabling Pay Period Closing
- Granting Permission to Close a Pay Period
- Close or Reopen a Pay Period
What Closing a Pay Period Does
Closing a Pay Period is a simple process where an Administrator clicks a button on the Time Card Summary page to close the pay period. Pay period closing only supports pay periods and does not allow the closing of other date ranges. Closing a pay period is important to:
- Prevent Time Card Edits - When a pay period is closed, all time cards within the pay period cannot be modified. This can serve as an indicator by Administrators that all the employee's time records and time cards have been finalized for company processes, such as AccountLinx exports, generating reports, etc.
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Prevent Time Punches from the Field - Any time punches made by employees from the field such as JobClocks or ExakTime Mobile will not populate the employee's time card and will instead funnel into the "Quarantined Time" tab of Time Card Summary. Quarantined time punches will not populate your time cards until the pay period has been reopened and the employee's time cards are not approved. Before reopening a pay period, double-check your quarantined time as reopening the pay period can use all quarantined time to populate the employee's time card.
Learn more about Quarantined Time from our dedicated article here.
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Deduct and Accrue Towards Time Off Balances - If you are using Time Off, closing your pay period will update your employee's time off balance such as accruals based on their time off plan or deductions from approved time off requests. If a closed pay period is reopened, time off balance changes will be reverted. If a pay period is not closed, any accrual balance updates and deductions from approved requests will stay in a pending state.
Learn more about Time Off from our dedicated article here.
Enabling Pay Period Closing
Pay Period can be enabled from the 'Company Settings' page of ExakTime Connect and allows you to set up a warning for users to finalize their time card on the time card summary page.
- Go to Manage and click Company Settings
- Go to Time & Attendance
- Enable Pay Period Closing
- You can also put a warning on the Time Card Summary for when the time card should be finalized.
- The warning will not automatically close the pay period. The pay period must be closed manually by the appropriate user.
- Click Save.
Granting Permission to Close a Pay Period
While all Administrators will already have permission to close a pay period, you can grant permission to close a pay period to other ExakTime Connect security roles. You can expand the section below for these steps if this is needed.
- Go to Manage and click on Security Roles.
- Click the ExakTime Connect tab.
- Click on the role that should have access or create a new role. Administrators will have the option by default.
- In the permissions to the right, enable access to "Close Pay Periods".
- Click Save at the bottom.
Close or Reopen A Pay Period
Once you are past the previous pay period and are past the first day of the following pay period, the option to close the pay period will be available on the Time Card Summary page. This is to ensure that all the time records from the previous work week have been calculated. (i.e. if the last day of the Pay Period is a Friday, but the First Day of the Week is Monday and if the Pay Period were closed then policies could not calculate for the rest of the days up until that "First Day of the Week".)
Closing a pay period must be done manually and is not automatic.
- Go to Time Cards and click on Time Card Summary.
- Make sure you are viewing either the 'Time Card Summary' or the 'Daily Summary' menus.
- Make sure you are viewing the appropriate pay period from the pre-defined range or viewing a date range that would be the equivalent of a pay period.
- Click on Close Pay Period to close the pay period or Reopen Pay Period if it has already been closed.
- A warning will appear for the date range you are closing and what will happen by closing. Click Close Pay Period to confirm the closing.
- A 'Pay Period Closed' label will appear towards the top of the summary.
- If the pay period has been closed, you can click Reopen Pay Period to reopen the pay period to edit time cards and unquaranting records.
- A warning will appear for the date range you are reopening and what will happen by reopening. Any quarantined records will also populate the appropriate time cards. Click Reopen Pay Period to confirm the reopening.
Learn more about using the Time Card Summary page from our dedicated article.