Pay cycles are the way employee timesheet costs are grouped for exporting for payroll.
Payroll & Leave > Pay cycles
Employees are assigned to a pay schedule, and are added to each pay cycle from their commencement date onwards. 
Use the ‘Search’ function to filter pay cycles by name, from a particular date range, or to include processed pay cycles. Pay cycle information displayed:
- Start and end date
- Name of each pay schedule
- Number of employees on the pay schedule
- Cost
- Status
Pay cycle actions
View
View takes you into the pay cycle to see all the included staff and an individual summary of their ordinary hours, the number of hours in that pay cycle and their overall cost. It also shows their award and will allow you to drill into a full breakdown of loadings for each shift exported to payroll in that period.
Export
Export allows you to run loadings reports (created and edited in Settings > Export templates), use a payroll add-on to generate a file to then import into your payroll system or export live to your payroll system via API
Process
Process is used to lock down a pay cycle after it has been completely finalised. This will update leave balances for leave types that are set to accrue leave and prevent any further changes to the timesheet entries and costings for shifts in that pay cycle.
It’s important to note that pay cycles should only be Processed once you are sure there will be no disputed payroll queries, as these records will not be able to be edited and any changes would need to be made in your payroll system manually, and will not be reflected in Ento.
These actions are covered in more detail in the next article, Running payroll.
Employee payroll changes and pay cycles
Changes made to employee payroll settings are effected by pay cycle. If you are changing employee awards, base rate, weekly ordinary hours or work schedule, you will need to decide if those changes should go into effect from the current pay cycle forwards, or from the next pay cycle forwards.
If you update any of these via employee import they will always be applied to the employees profile from the next pay cycle forwards.
No changes can be made to these details for a previous pay cycle, so as best practice we advise you review a pay cycle before it ends. More on that in the next article, Running payroll.
Moving staff to a different pay cycle
Pay cycles are fixed, and cannot be changed. New pay cycles can be created and employees can be moved to a new pay cycle. To move a staff member to a new pay cycle, wait until the current pay cycle has been finalised, and do not move them until the the first day of the new pay cycle. Moving an employee mid pay cycle will add them to the new one, but they will no longer be part of the old pay cycle, meaning they will not appear in reporting for that period and will not get paid.
Pay cycle checks
There are certain checks that are best done during a pay cycle, before the pay cycle ends. Employee base rates, awards, work schedule and weekly ordinary hours are all configuration items for employees that can only be changed effective from the current pay cycle forwards or the next pay cycle forwards.
Pay cycle exports and processing
Clicking Export from the pay cycle page will not automatically export a pay cycle, it will take you to the list of available exports for that pay cycle. You can export a pay cycle as many times as you like. Processing a pay cycle finalises a pay cycle, locks down timesheets for that period so they can no longer be edited, and updates leave accruals. More on exporting and processing pay cycles in the the next article, Running payroll.
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