Self Service Payroll Timecard Pay Schedule Setup Tips

Hello! With more and more users implementing Timecards I wanted to share some information on recommendations that I have found helpful to users in successfully setting up Timecard Pay Schedules. Using the information below will help increase the performance of your Current Timecards Navigation list and save you the headache at year end of setting up new schedules for each year!

Many users came from Business Portal where a new pay schedule was set up every year. The good news is that in Microsoft Dynamics GP, you can set up one schedule, and have it run for multiple years.

(HR & Payroll >> Setup >> Payroll >> Pay Schedule Setup)

For Example, I am setting up a Schedule for my Weekly Pay periods, I will name it weekly.

Be sure enough past pay periods are displayed for employees. For example, an employee may need to view past pay periods so that she can enter vacation hours for time already taken. Or an employee may have saved—and not yet submitted—a timecard for a previous pay period. If you choose to no longer display past pay periods, the employee will not be able to submit the saved timecard.  We use the Microsoft Dynamics GP user date to determine what pay periods to show.

Then I can enter my start date such as 12/30/2017, and click ‘Create Pay Periods’.

Note: You do have the option to use only full pay periods, or not.

As you can see below, because my first date is in the year 2017, the list displays 2017, however as you can see by my dates, these are 2018 pay periods. This Year column has nothing to do with posting dates in payroll or anything like that so don’t get hung up here.

Now, that I have created my pay schedule for the year, I can click the ‘Year’ drop down list as shown above and select my next year to create my pay schedules. You can do this more than one year into the future by simply entering a ‘Begin Date’ of the next year that you want to set up and creating the periods. This will prevent you from having to disable your pay schedule and enable a new one every year.

It’s time to assign these pay schedules to your employees. You want to be smart about what selections you use when assigning the Schedules. The more tabs that you make selections in (Location, Department, Position, Class, Employee) the longer it will take to load your Current Timecards Navigation List. I recommend using just one tab to assign you pay schedule to your employees.

For example, Departments and Positions are required fields on your employees so you know every employee has one, whereas not every employee will have a class, or location. Below you can see that I used the ‘Department’ Tab. I left all other tabs unmarked as they are redundant. This will keep my navigation lists running quicker!

I hope this helps you in minimizing your tasks at year end as well as keep your system running as performant as possible for your users and guides you to the proper way to set up your Timecard Pay Schedules.