After the end date of a pay period has passed, you must perform a series of "end of period" operations to close the pay period. These operations include locking the pay cycle to prevent further changes, correcting any critical errors in the pay period data, ensuring that required approvals have been recorded, generating any required reports, and preparing an export file that can be used by your payroll processing program. After all of these tasks have been completed, you can move the pay period data into history and move the pay cycle forward. The "current pay period" then becomes the "past pay period" and can no longer be edited. The pay period that was formerly considered to be the "next pay period" becomes the "current pay period."

Note: If your company's payroll schedule requires you to prepare (or begin preparing) payroll before each pay period has actually ended, you can use the Projected Payroll feature to generate payroll based on employees' projected total hours for the pay period. If you use this feature, you must still perform all of the End of Period Operations and close the pay period in a timely manner. However, the timing and exact procedures are different from those described in this section of the Help. If you need to use projected payroll, see the Projecting Payroll section instead.

End of period operations must be performed for every pay period in every pay cycle used by your company. For example, if your company uses a bi-weekly pay cycle to pay some employees and a monthly pay cycle to pay other employees, you must perform end of period operations every two weeks for the bi-weekly pay cycle and once a month for the monthly pay cycle. The End of Period page allows you to see at a glance the end dates for the current pay period and next pay period in each pay cycle. In order to avoid losing employee time data, you must perform end of period operations before the end date of the next pay period. You can configure pay cycle notifications for each pay cycle to help you remember to perform end of period operations in a timely manner. When the end date of the next pay period comes within a threshold number of days, a warning appears on the Practitioner Time & Attendance  Home page. You can also configure the system to e-mail the end of period warning messages to selected individuals.

The End of Period Operations interface makes it easy for you to perform all of the tasks required to close a pay period. These tasks are divided into a series of sequenced pages in the End of Period Operations interface. You can run the End of Period Operations step-by-step or automatically. If you run End of Period step-by step, the application stops on each End of Period page even if no errors are found. After you make any needed corrections for a page, you can click the Next Step button to progress to the next End of Period page. If you run the process automatically, you simply click a single link and the system automatically progresses through each End of Period page without the need for you to repeatedly click the Next Step button. If an error is found, the automatic process stops and the page includes on-screen instructions that explain the actions you need to take to correct the errors. When you correct all errors, you can return to your location in the End of Period steps and restart the automatic process.

For more information about performing end of period tasks, see the following topics: