We have an article answering all of those questions right here, but here are short answers to each question:
- What is Processing a Pay Period?
Processing a Pay Period is taking the data that occurred between two times and dates—usually the start and the end of your pay period—and creating a separate database with just that data in it. When you “process” a pay period, the employees’ profiles and all of your pay policies accompany the data. - Why is it important?
Each time you collect the data from your TimePilot clocks, your employees’ clock-ins and clock-outs accumulate in the TimePilot software. (You can see them in TimePilot Central.) They build up fast: If you have 15 employees clocking in or out four times a day, that’s 60 transactions a day, 300 a week, 1,200 a month, more than 14,000 a year. That’s a lot of data.That’s why we strongly recommend extracting your transactions at the end of your pay period.
To visualize the concept, imagine the database is a huge pot—we’ll call it “Current Transactions.” Every day, more and more clock-ins and clock-outs are dumped 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 grab those transactions and move them 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. You can also run reports and get the data ready for payroll.
As we said earlier, when you process a pay period, the employees’ profiles and all of your pay policies accompany the data, creating a snapshot of your company in that time period. That’s important, because it can get pretty confusing if you change your pay policies or add or subtract employees six months down the road and haven’t processed your pay periods.
Another benefit is that processing your pay periods keeps things nice and neat for your recordkeeping. You can also save processed pay periods to a CD or external hard drive for backup.
- Am I required to do it?
No. Some of our customers never do it. But it’s a very simple process—the instructions are here—and you can save yourself lots of headaches by taking just a moment or two and doing it.