Once your pay cycle is complete it’s time to do a final review, export the payroll and process payroll.
Payroll & leave > Pay cycles
Reviewing a pay cycle
To view a pay cycle before it ends go to Payroll > Pay cycles and click ‘View’ to see more detail. Here you will see each employee, the number of shifts or leave entries for the pay cycle, their standard hours, the employment_contract they are on for that pay cycle, and a summary of their counted hours and total cost. Click ‘View’ to see each shift or leave entries details.
You can also use any of the export reports available to review the pay cycle in a spreadsheeting program, click ‘Export’ to see the available templates.
Run or export a pay cycle
First ensure you have approved all timesheets for the pay cycle. When viewing your pay cycle you will see the number of pending timesheets in the status column, if any, which are timesheets that haven’t yet been approved (if running payroll early, this may be a significant number - read section below for how to best manage Running payroll early).
An approved timesheet is a shift’s actual counted hours, which have been verified by a manager. Unless zeroed out, all unapproved timesheets will export as rostered, ignoring any clock in/out data, so ensure you have an approval process in place.
Review your loadings reports to ensure pay rates and leave etc are correct, then it is time to export your pay cycle.
Go to Payroll > Pay cycles > find the correct pay cycle, and click Export. You will then be able to select your export template, click your branded payroll system API export button, or export a file type specifically created for importing into your payroll system.
Running payroll early
At some point it may be necessary to run a payroll early, either due to a planned absence of someone on your admin team, or due to where public holidays fall. If your pay cycle ends on a Sunday and a public holiday falls on a Monday when you would usually run payroll, you may want to run payroll the Friday before the end of the pay cycle. The simplest way to do this is to export the pay cycle as usual, before the end of the pay cycle, and pay staff as rostered for any currently unauthorised days.
We don’t recommend authorising timesheets before shifts have been worked, as this will stop staff from clocking in and out of their shifts to record hours worked. Running a comparison report once you have actual hours recorded will provide a list of manual adjustments to make. If a payroll is run early, to determine the variance you will need to compare the early payroll export with an actuals export after the shifts are worked and authorised. This requires you running a Loadings Export at time of early payroll export, and then running the same export once again once the shifts have been worked and hours authorised.
To run this, go to Payroll & leave > Comparison tool. Ensure you have the early payroll export created using the required export template, then run the same export so the comparison tool can compare them. This is covered in detail in the Comparison tool article.
Pay cycles can be exported without being processed, and recommended best practice is to ensure any queries about the payroll are investigated and addressed before processing.
When running payroll early, it’s recommended to only ‘Process’ the pay cycle after the usual payroll run date, to ensure you have time to lock in any variations. Once it is confirmed there are no changes required, click the green 'Process' button to lock down the pay cycle, and update the leave accruals for the period.
TIPS:
- Check all required public holidays for the period are created (contact Ento Support if you add any public holiday and need to request the pay cycle is recosted)
- If you have permanent staff who will not work the public holiday, check they have a type of Public Holiday Not Worked leave created and Approved, and check it is not clashing with rostered shifts (unless your company process allows and expects both)
- worked have been entered in Ento to ensure your team are paid correctly. You can check this in Payroll & Leave > Public Holidays, read more about that here.
Export types
Clicking Export from the pay cycle page will not automatically export your pay cycle, it will take you to the list of available exports for that pay cycle. This may be the link for your selected payroll system API export or payroll file export, or any number of available customised loadings or shift reports.
These reports are useful for reviewing your pay cycle data in Excel or another spreadsheeting program, and may include Loading Summary by Staff and Daily Loading Breakdown by Staff, allowing you to check your data is correct before you run your payroll.
Even if you use an API integration for exporting your payroll, it's useful to export a CSV copy of your payroll as it stands the day you export it, so you can use the Comparison Tool later, by comparing that export to another export.
NOTE: To use the Comparison tool, make sure the Custom Loadings Export template you plan to use includes the two fields under Extra ticket - Cost and Earning Rate units.
To see all available templates go to Settings > Export templates. Custom loadings CSV template exports can only be run from the pay cycles area, while Custom shift CSV exports can be run directly from rosters, the review timesheets area, or from the pay cycles area.
Click Add Ons at the bottom of the main Ento menu to the left to connect a new payroll add on or to see the mapping of your existing payroll add on.
Processing a pay cycle
Once staff have been paid and any queries resolved it is time to lock down the pay cycle to prevent further edits.
When you process a pay cycle, leave accruals and deductions are calculated which then sees each staff leave balance updated. All timesheets are also locked from future editing.
Where to now?
Comparison tool
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