Sage 100

Payroll timing question. A customer changed the payroll to one week in arrears. In payroll module you enter the period ending date which is one week before actual pay date. If this falls on a month end, like today, they can't run checks in November because they are crossing periods. I am recommending using the pay date for all dates. This eliminates the crossing periods. It also eliminates the potential for being told that they didn't make timely deposits (3 day depositor is always late when paying 1 week in arrears). The down side is that this is confusing to the hourly employees because the period ending date is not aligned with the actual timecards. Any Sage wisdom?

There is an option to allow G/L accrual postings but I haven't used it much.

There is no reason they can't cross periods for pay period ending and pay date. They can't cross quarters though. Either they can manually calculate the accrual (if that's even the concern) or let the system do it.

They don't need accrual as they are cash basis. @NancyHanson - So... you are basically saying the problem must have occurred in September and are asking now because of same month end issue,. My advice would then still be applicable for year end as we would not want to record a Hanuary payroll in 2014.

If the pay period end date is only a reference, then crossing months, quarters or years won't matter. You may get a warning, but you can click ok and move on.

You need to run quarter end processing prior to processing for the next quarter, but there is no month end processing. So if you have a pay period end date of 12/30/2014 and a paydate of 1/7/15, you would need to perform quarter/year end processing first and then you can process payroll in 2015. Before running quarter/year end, I generally copy the company to a backup as all reporting would need to be done before you can close a quarter/year so often times we process the reports from the copy company.

Gary - the accrual isn't like accrual you normally think of. Accrual with Payroll means that if you run a check date Nov 4 but the period end date was in October, the system will automatically post into October. You can use actual accrual accounts or regular payroll expense accounts. The IRS only cares about the Check Date. The GL only cares about the posting date UNLESS you have accruals turned on.

When I look at PR Options - Allow GL Accruals does not appear to be applicable: Allow G/L Accrual Postings Select this check box to post Payroll expenses and accrual postings to the general ledger based on a calculated percentage. Clear this check box to post expenses by Payroll accounting date.

Without the accrual box checked, all expense will post according to the payroll check/posting date. With it checked, it will determine what % of the expense is related to the prior month and post it there and the balance to the check date (or posts the % to the prior month and reverses it the next along with posting the full payroll into the check date month - can't remember exactly what the entry is). but the net effect is the % of the payroll that was incurred the prior month is expensed in the prior month.

Thanks for all the help. I explained the options to the customer and they understand as well as a typical customer can.