Pay Period ID's

[Customer Service]

Can you explain how C21 calculates the “Pay Period ID” in payroll and why I see an “a” or “b” after the “Pay Period ID”?

When you go to close the pay period, C21 will put a default date in the “Pay Period ID” field. You can change that date as you desire. If the start date and end date were specified, then the default “Pay Period ID” is based on the “Pay Period End Date”. If start and end dates were not specified, the “C21 Default Date” on the menu bar will be used to generate the Pay Period ID.

If the “Pay Period ID” is based on an end date of 4/27/2006. You can have the same payroll start and end dates for multiple payrolls.
If you run an “hourly payroll” with a start date of 4/21/2006 and an end date of 4/27/2006. You could run an “Hourly Payroll” with the start and end dates above.
As soon as you have completed the hourly payroll you could run the “maintenance payroll” using the same start and end dates.
Then you could run an “administrative payroll” for this period.
You would run each payroll and then go to “Close Pay Period Check List” and close each payroll as it is finished. Your “Pay Period ID would look like the following:

Department ----Pay Period ID
Hourly -------- 2006.04.27
Maintenance --- 2006.04.27a
Administration -- 2006.04.27b

Can you explain the relationship between the “Pay Period ID” and the pay period “Start” and “End” dates?

The general nature of the processing is that the program “remembers” the specified pay period start and end dates in the company configuration file. At “close pay period” time, the program puts the most recent end date it can find in the configuration file. If a pay period end date is not found it will use the current “as of date” as a basis for creating a default pay period ID.

If the ID the system creates is an ID that already exists, then the program will start adding “a”, “b”, “c”, and so on until it finds a unique pay period ID to present as a default. There are a few points that need to be understood:

The pay period start and end dates and the pay period IDs have nothing do with how information is posted to General Ledger or to Payroll history.
With payroll checks or adjustments, the program requests a specific G/L period. That period will be used for G/L posting.
The check date or adjustment date is used as the transaction date for recording in G/L and for determining what month, quarter, year the payroll history posts to.
The program does try to track pay period dates and default the next appropriate time span in Calculate Payroll. But those dates can and should be overridden as needed to accurately reflect the payroll being processed.
The “pay period ID” initially presented in the “Close Pay Period Checklist” command is just a default.
The program makes the best choice it can based on the date information available.
The ID can be overridden and it doesn't even have to be in the date based format.
Any 12 character unique ID value is acceptable. It is expected that each user will establish an appropriate naming convention (of which the program default may be perfectly acceptable) and modify the defaulted ID as needed to ensure the convention is followed.