You can run a guided process in Payroll to generate retroactive entries that adjust for back dated changes to a non-auto pay employee’s base pay rate.
For example, say an employee who is paid biweekly receives a two dollar raise that is back dated in their HR profile by a month. With this functionality, the application can generate quick entries in the current pay run to pay the employee the difference between their old base rate and the new base rate for the last month of pay.
So, if the employee earned $160 at $20 per hour for an eight-hour day in the past month, and the back dated rate is changed to $22 per hour, the sync pay process generates a quick entry for $16 to adjust for that day.
Note: The employee’s base rate is stored and can be updated in the Base Rate field of the Employment > Employment Settings screen in the People feature.
This functionality is similar to the pay sync functionality that is available for auto pay employees and employees who are paid for time that is recorded in WFM. However, it is intended for organizations that manually add or import payroll entries (that is, quick entries, checks) into the Payroll feature. For more information on the other sync pay functionality offered in Dayforce, see the topics Run the Sync Pay Changes Wizard, and Sync Pay Changes in Pay Admin Checklist in the Pay Approval Guide.
Note the following before using this feature:
| Functionality | Notes |
|---|---|
| Business Day is Required |
The sync pay functionality for non-auto-pay employees requires that entries that are manually added or imported to Payroll have a business date specified. This is how the application can compare the date in which a pay entry was created against the date that the employee’s base rate changed in their HR profile. Quick entries, for example, include a Business Date column for this purpose. If you leave the business date column undefined for a payroll entry, the application defaults its business date to the pay period end date of the pay run. Note: The sync auto pay functionality for non-auto-pay employees always uses pay period end date as the default date for entries that do not have the Business Date column defined, even if the employee’s pay group is set to use pay date as the default. See Configure Default Dates for Payroll Qualifiers and Generated Earnings in the Dayforce Implementation Guide. |
| Sync is Performed for Rate Based Earnings |
This functionality generates adjustments for earnings that are calculated using a rate. It does not calculate adjustments for generated earnings (for example, earnings scheduled in the employee’s payroll elections), deductions, garnishments, or taxes. It isn’t supported for premium earnings that are configured to have a rate (that is, that have the Premium and Pay Entry Rates checkboxes selected in the General subtab of the Earnings tab in Payroll Setup > Earnings and Deductions). For these earnings the application uses the hours that you enter for calculation purposes only, and it does not save the hours with the entry. This functionality is supported for earning codes that have a rate multiplier set up in the General subtab of Earnings tab in Payroll Setup > Earnings and Deductions. Continuing the earlier example where the employee has a rate increase of two dollars back dated a month, say that an employee had eight hours of overtime during that time. If the employee’s base rate was $20 and the overtime earning has a multiplier of 1.5, the employee earned $240 for those eight hours at a rate of $30. If the employee’s base rate increased to $22, the employee should have earned $264 for those hours at a rate of $33. As a result, the sync process generates an entry for $24. Note: While this functionality can generate adjustments for WFM sourced earnings that use a rate, it is recommended that you use the WFM based functionality for syncing pay for WFM earnings. See Sync Pay Changes in Pay Admin Checklist in the Pay Approval Guide. |
| Eligible Pay Runs and Earnings |
When you run the sync pay process for non-auto pay employees, the application looks for eligible earnings on or after the date that the new base rate became effective. This can include all or part of the current pay run and committed pay runs. This includes regular pay runs and off cycles. For example, say an employee is in a semi-monthly pay group, and you are currently processing pay for the second pay run of the month. Now, say you update the employee's base rate, backdated to the middle of the first pay period of the month. As a result, the application looks for eligible earnings in the following pay runs:
The application looks for entries both in committed pay runs and the current run by default. However, during the guided process, you can set it to only look at committed pay runs, or vice versa. Looking at earnings in the current run saves you the effort of updating saved entries after a base rate change. For example, say you import a number of payroll entries in the current pay run, and then there is a base rate change back dated to include the whole pay period. Instead of reimporting or manually editing the entries, you can run the sync process to generate entries that adjust for the rate change. |
Additional notes about this feature:
- The application only updates records from the employee’s current pay group. Employee pay group changes are out of scope for the existing functionality.
- The recommended maximum pay runs for the application to look back to for the employees you select in the sync process is 200. For example, if the application needs to look back more than 10 pay runs for each employee, select no more than 20 employees for each sync process that you run, or else it will take longer than expected for the application to generate the entries.
- Submitting the guided process triggers an internal background job to generate the retro pay entries. In the case where the maximum pay run limit is exceeded, the job will be queued rather than running immediately after you submit the guided process.