Pay groups define the frequency of pay periods for a group of employees, as well as when their payroll records need to be reviewed, approved, and transmitted to your payroll application.
Before You Begin: You must configure pay groups before end users start using Dayforce. Pay groups are an integral part of tracking time and attendance, as well as paying employees.
Important: If you are configuring a pay group for ConnectedPay, see Configure Pay Groups for ConnectedPay.
Pay groups are configured to match your organization's business and payroll needs. The frequency of a pay group's pay periods takes into account:
- How often employees are paid.
- The duration of time managers review and approve at a time.
- The duration of periods payroll rules consider. Pay periods should match the time period payroll rules examine. For example, if employees are paid overtime on a weekly basis, you'd want to create weekly or biweekly pay periods so that a pay period never ends in the middle of an overtime period.
When configuring a pay group, you must define the following:
- Approval period: This is the period of time that managers review and approve time and attendance records. If managers review and approve employee attendance on a weekly basis, you would create a pay group with a weekly approval period.
- Export period: This is the period of payroll records that are exported to your organization's payroll system. Because employees are paid at the end of each export period, this also defines how often employees are paid.
These periods don’t necessarily need to be the same duration. For example, if managers review and approve attendance on a weekly basis, but employees are paid on a biweekly basis, you'd configure a pay group with a one-week approval period and a two-week export period.
Further, you can also configure pay groups so that time is committed (that is, pay is closed) more frequently than payroll is transmitted, so that once pay is closed for a period, any subsequent changes result in retros even though the period hasn't yet been transmitted. Pay can be closed on a weekly basis when payroll is transmitted biweekly, or on a semi-monthly basis when payroll is transmitted monthly.
You can also have more than one pay group per location. For example, if hourly employees are on a different pay cycle than salaried employees, you can create a pay group for hourly employees and create another pay group for salaried employees.
You configure pay groups for specific areas of the organization in Pay Setup > Pay Group. You can configure a pay group at any level in the org structure. The org level that you configure for a pay group directly impacts which employees can be assigned to the pay group. For example, say the top of your organizational chart is labeled Corporate. If you select Corporate, the pay group you are configuring can be assigned to employees in any location. Conversely, if you have a site called Store 123, and you configure the pay group to that site, only employees assigned to Store 123 can be associated with the pay group.