Running payroll

Paidsley does not pay anyone. It produces the numbers your payroll provider pays from, and it tries hard to stop you sending numbers that are wrong.

Pay periods

A pay period has a start date, an end date, and a check date — the day people are actually paid, which appears on the wage statement. The check date is derived from the offset you set in Settings.

Approvals

Employees submit their timesheets; a manager approves them. The Reports screen shows how many are still outstanding, because an unapproved timesheet is usually a conversation someone has not had yet.

Anomalies: the things that stop a close

Before a period can be finalised, Paidsley checks for problems and sorts them into two kinds.

Blocking — these must be fixed. They include:

• A shift that was never clocked out
• Two clock-ins with no clock-out between them, or a clock-out with no clock-in
• Hours recorded at a zero pay rate
• A salaried employee with no salary set
• A single shift longer than sixteen hours
• A meal break started but never returned from
• A missing rest-break attestation
• An alternative workweek schedule, which Paidsley cannot yet calculate
• No paid-sick-leave rate method elected

Warnings — worth reading, but they do not stop you. For example, an inside-sales commission exemption that failed its test this period, in which case overtime has already been paid normally.

Every one of these is a number that would otherwise be wrong. A zero pay rate is the clearest case: without the block, Paidsley would cheerfully produce a zero paycheque.

Closing the period

Closing writes a payroll run — an immutable snapshot of what was owed. It records each employee's hours and dollars broken into buckets: base pay, overtime premium, double-time premium, commission, flat-sum bonus, retro overtime, PTO, sick pay, unpaid leave, meal premiums, rest premiums and reporting-time pay.

Once written, a run does not change. Corrections are made by a later adjustment run, so the history stays intact and you can always show what was paid and when.

Premiums on a run

Meal and rest premiums accrued during the period are carried onto the run as their own earning lines, at the regular rate.

They can be marked resolved with a reason before the close — if a break genuinely was provided and the record is wrong, say so and record why. What they cannot be is silently deleted. Since Naranjo v. Spectrum Security Services (2022) 13 Cal.5th 93 these are wages, and a wage that disappears without explanation is exactly the thing you would need to account for later.

Additional pay

Commissions, bonuses and reimbursements are added as pay extras, each with a treatment that decides how it affects overtime:

• Commission or production — rises with output, so it is divided across all hours worked when computing the regular rate.
• Flat sum — a fixed amount that does not rise with hours, divided across non-overtime hours only, per Alvarado v. Dart Container (2018) 4 Cal.5th 542. This produces a larger overtime premium.
• Reimbursement — a repayment of an expense, not wages, so it does not enter the regular rate at all.

Choosing the wrong treatment changes what someone is owed, which is why Paidsley asks rather than assuming.

Retro overtime on commissions

When a commission is paid for work already done, the overtime for those weeks was calculated without it — so more overtime is now owed.

Paidsley works out that extra amount, allocates it back to the workweeks the commission was earned in, and shows it as retro overtime. A supplemental run pays it, and records which earning periods it covers so the payment can be explained.

This is a genuinely difficult calculation to do by hand, and skipping it is a common and expensive mistake.

What to check before you close

• No blocking anomalies
• Timesheets approved
• Premiums reviewed and either resolved with a reason or left to be paid
• Commissions and bonuses entered with the right treatment
• Pay rates set for everyone who worked