Pay Groups

What this guide covers

A pay group decides when a set of employees is paid: the cut-off dates of their pay period, when payday falls, and how often they are paid. Pay Groups (Payroll -> Payroll Settings -> Pay Groups) is where those groups are configured and where people are enrolled into them.

Who can open it: an administrator with pay-group admin rights. This is configuration setup, so it is available whether or not real pay runs are switched on.

What a pay group defines

• Cut-off (cycle start day) - the day of the month the pay period starts. The standard group, Main, runs the 26th to the 25th, so a "month" of pay is the 26th of one month to the 25th of the next, not the calendar month.
• Payday rule - either the last working day of the period, or a fixed day of the month.
• Frequency - monthly. (Fortnightly and weekly are not yet supported.)
• Active - whether the group is in use.

The cut-off matters well beyond this screen: a payroll run can only be opened once the period's cut-off has passed, and it is the pay group's cycle - not the calendar month - that decides which overtime lands on which payslip.

Enrolling people: two layers

Membership works on two layers, and you can mix them freely:

• Individual employees - enrol one person directly.
• Whole departments - enrol a department, which also covers its sub-departments. This is the low-maintenance option: new joiners in that department are picked up automatically.

The members panel shows the resolved roster - the actual list of who is in the group - and labels each row with how they got there, either Direct or via <Department>. Always read the resolved roster rather than assuming, because the two layers can overlap.

Which rule wins when they overlap

When more than one rule could apply to the same person, the most specific one wins:

1. An individual enrolment beats everything else.
2. Otherwise, the nearest department in the org tree wins.
3. Otherwise, an ancestor department applies.

So you can enrol a whole division by department and still move one person onto a different cycle by enrolling them individually - the individual entry takes precedence, and no exception list is needed.

Good to know

• Changing a group's cut-off changes which days fall into which pay period. Do it between runs, not mid-period.
• Enrolling a department is usually better than enrolling its members one by one - it keeps working as people join and leave.
• If someone's pay period looks wrong, check the resolved roster first: they may be inheriting a department enrolment you had forgotten about.
• An employee's pay group is shown on their Employee Overview.

Related guides

• Running monthly payroll (myWork -> SimplePay) - the run that uses these periods.
• How working time is calculated - how the overtime cut-off cycle interacts with the working week.
• Employee Overview - where to see one employee's pay group.