Expert: Shirley McAllister, CPP, PHR - 1/19/2009

Question
At my office we are currently paid from Thursday to Wednesday (biweekly). Problem is Wednesday is also the day I must enter payroll and submit to our vendor.  This means that hourly employees must estimate their lunch and clock out time on their time card.  This current system does not work very well and we would like to change the cut off date.  Possibly change to "Sunday through Saturday".We would like to make this as painless as possible for the employees and give adequate time to calculate payroll. How should we go about this? And are there any issues I need to consider before changing?

Answer
What you need to do is let all the employees know 30 days in advance that payroll is changing.  

What we do is cut off on Friday and pay the next Friday. There is always one week in arrears and that week is paid when the employee terminates employment. We pay every two weeks.

Instead of cutting off on Wednesday you will cut off on Saturday.  So your time goes from Thursday to Saturday (1st week) and Sun-Saturday (2nd week) That means that the 1st week of the new pay period will only have 3 days pay, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The employees will have to plan for a short check or you will have to allow them to use PTO or vacation time to ease the transition.

They will cut off on Wednesday, get paid on Saturday. Then the next pay period which is the first of the new cycle will start on Thursday cut off on Saturday and the 2nd week will be Sun-Sat from then on. Only one pay period will be short.

Shirley