What is a Pay Run?

Unlike most payroll systems – where you generally have a “payroll run”, which finalises all payslips in the current period and moves everything over to the next period – on SimplePay, a pay run is merely a grouping of payslips.

The finalisation of your payroll data actually happens at the payslip level. You could, in theory, use the system without ever creating pay runs, finalising each payslip individually instead, but pay runs are a very convenient concept and allow for certain additional reports to be generated.

The advantage of SimplePay’s approach is that issues with one employee, for example waiting for a timesheet, do not have to hold up processing for the other employees. You can create a pay run that includes all employees except the one with issues and then create a second one later for the individual employee.

Bulk Finalise Payslips

Pay runs allow you to finalise your payslips in bulk instead of doing them individually. For more information, see the following article:

Bulk Actions > Bulk Finalise and Review Payslips

Create a Pay Run

If you have done payslips for several periods at once, there will be more than one pay run and you will need to click the Show more link to see all of the runs for the period. We recommend creating a pay run at the end of each period to finish the payroll process.

Once you have finalised your payslips, either individually, or in bulk as described above, click on the Create Pay Run link for that period. As mentioned above, this process has no impact on the data or finalisation of payslips; it simply groups them and allows you to view certain reports and perform certain actions:

Release Payslips to Self-Service

SimplePay allows you to automatically email your employees’ payslips to them to access electronically. If you have this set up, creating a pay run will enable you to release the payslips to self-service – the option is selected by default and your employees will receive emails once you click Create Pay Run.

If you would like to create the pay run and release the payslips at a later stage, untick the Automatically release payslips to self-service option before clicking Create Pay Run. To release them at a later stage, go to Pay Runs, then click on the dropdown arrow next to the pay run date and click on Self-Service Release > Release.

For more information on setting up and using this feature, please see the following articles:

Reports

Once you have created the pay run, you will be able to download the following reports:

Single PDF containing all payslips for the run
Accounting report
Summary of nett pay values
3rd party payment summary

Additional reports containing employees’ details and breakdowns of their payslip items, for example, can be downloaded from the Reports tab. Please see the following article for more information:

Accounting Info

Once you have created a pay run, you can download an accounting report in either PDF or Excel format. This contains a summary of the various expense and liability amounts relevant to the pay run and can be used to capture the information in your accounting records.

If you are making use of our accounting system integration feature, you will also be able to post this information directly to the relevant accounts.* Please see the following section for more information:

Payment Info

You will also be able to view a summary of the nett pay amounts per employee in PDF or Excel format, grouped by payment method. Where employees or beneficiaries are paid by electronic bank transfer, you will also be able to download bulk payment files for each, which you can then upload into your online banking platform.

Delete a Pay Run

In certain instances, you may need to delete a pay run; for instance, payslips cannot be unfinalised if they are part of a pay run. You can do this by navigating to the relevant pay run and clicking on the dropdown arrow next to the date of the pay run you want to delete, and then select Delete.

Deleting a pay run does not unfinalise payslips or alter any of the amounts they contain; it simply ungroups them, allowing you to make changes if necessary.

*Please note: if you have posted accounting information, this post will be reversed when the pay run is deleted. If you are using the advanced accounting option and have multiple posts per pay run, each one will need to be deleted by clicking the next to it before the pay run can be deleted.

Bulk Undo Finalise of Payslips

As previously mentioned, pay runs do not imply finalisation of payslips, so when you delete a pay run, the payslips it contained are still finalised. However, after deleting the pay run, the finalised payslips will appear again under Pending Pay Runs. You can unfinalise them in bulk by clicking on Undo Finalise.

Please note: This option should only be used if you are sure that you need to make changes to all of the payslips in the run. If you are at all unsure, or you know you only need to edit one / a few payslips, please DO NOT use this option – you should rather go to each employee’s profile and click on Undo Finalise on the relevant payslip.

Once you have made the necessary changes, you can follow the process(es) outlined in the sections above.

Still stuck? You can browse the index for related topics or simply contact us.

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