TimePilot Central

Processing a Pay Period   Video available

You've set up your clocks and your software, assigned your employees their iButtons and started collecting their clock-ins and clock-outs. Now the pay period has ended and it's time to collect your data and get it ready for payroll. This is where the TimePilot software really shines.

Here's how it works: When your pay period has ended and it's time to process your payroll, you use TimePilot Central to move all the transactions that occurred during that time into a "processed pay period."

Processing this data also copies your current employee profiles, pay types, etc. into the this processed pay period. This "snapshot" preserves your setup information so that when you review this pay period in the future it will reflect the way things were at that time, and not show any changes made since then.

To visualize the concept, imagine the database is a huge pot. Every day, the TimePilot time clocks dump more clock-ins and clock-outs into the pot. Now it's the end of a two-week pay period, so you want to remove just clock-ins and clock-outs for the last two weeks from the pot. With the TimePilot Central software, you move just those transactions, along with employee and company data in effect at the time, to a separate, smaller pot. In the smaller pot, it's much easier to see what you have and it keeps the big pot from eventually overflowing.

Once the pay period is processed, you can make any corrections that weren't made before processing—if, for instance, an employee forgot to clock in or out—and add transactions for vacations, holidays, etc., to create a complete record of each employee's workweek. Then you can create and print reports for further review. Optionally, you can "export" the file to your payroll service or accounting software.

Note: You can also export your data to a spreadsheet (.xlsx format, commonly used by Microsoft Excel) or word processing document (.docx, commonly used by Microsoft Word, or .rtf, Rich Text Format). In addition, you can print your data or create a PDF version of the data with TimePilot's built-in tools. For more, see the page on Reports.

Getting ready for payroll, step by step

1. Start TimePilot Central 5.
2. You can make any changes or corrections to transactions now or after you process the pay period.
3. Click the "Process Pay Period" button in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
1. In the pay period extraction box (shown below), choose the company whose pay period you're processing from the drop-down list at the top, then choose the beginning and ending of the pay period.
   
2. Click "Process."
3. A processing message will appear in the title bar of TimePilot Central 5. (See image at right)
4. Once the processing is complete, the header across the top of the Transaction List will change from gray to yellow, indicating that you are now looking at a processed pay period and not the Unprocessed Transactions.
4. Correct any employee transactions that are erroneous, using the Quick Buttons across the top of the screen. Names in red in the employee list down the left side of the screen indicate trouble spots that the TimePilot software has identified.
   It's a good idea to also look over each employee's transactions to verify that they make sense. For instance, if an employee clocks in at 8 a.m. on Tuesday, forgets to clock out that night, also forgets to clock in Wednesday morning, but clocks out Wednesday night, the TimePilot software sees a clock-in followed by a clock-out and will not flag the error, unless you set the Alerts feature to flag excessive amounts of time.
5. Insert transactions for vacations, sick days, paid time off and bereavement time, if necessary. This is done manually. The simplest way to do this is to click on the employee's name, then click on the Insert Time Quick Button. Enter the date and amount of time the employee is entitled to and click "OK."
6. Generate a report. Click the "Reports" tab, then choose your report. ("Summary Report" is the most common choice.) If you want a printed copy of the report, click the "Print" button on the left side of the Reports screen. If you want an electronic copy of the report that can be saved or e-mailed, click the "Export" button at the top of the screen and choose your file format: PDF, Microsoft Word (.docx), or Excel. When you're done, close the Reports screen to return to TimePilot Central.
7. Optional: Export your data to your payroll software or service. A number of Payroll Exports are available, like QuickBooks or ADP. Click the Pay Periods tab to select the export you want (see screenshot below).
   

   
   To install a Payroll Export, go to the Pay Periods screen and click the 'Install Payroll Export' button. You can have more than one export installed.

Opening a Processed Pay Period

Once a pay period has been processed it can opened and viewed by clicking on the Pay Periods Tab, selecting the pay period from the list of processed pay periods and click "Open Pay Period."

Once the Pay Period is open the title bar will turn yellow indicating that you are viewing or working in a processed pay period. To return to the current "Unprocessed Transactions" click the "Close Pay Period" and the title bar will change to gray.

Once a Processed Pay Period is open, any changes to transactions or the setup of the company, shifts, locations, job sites, overtime policies, etc., are only changed in that pay period and not the current "Unprocessed Transactions." Likewise, if you make changes to the current Unprocessed Transactions. They do not affect the already processed pay periods.

A common mistake is to process a pay period, then realize that you need to make a change to an employee setting or one of the setup items, make the change and think you have made the change going forward, so when you process the next pay period the change still needs to be made. The solution is to either reverse the processed pay period or if the change is simple, close the processed pay period and again make the change to the current Unprocessed Transactions.