🗓️ Define Pay Schedules
⏱️ Plan ahead. Pay on time. Stay compliant. Pay schedules are the heartbeat of your payroll system. In this step, we’ll build the recurring structure that tells FlexPay when to process payments, how frequently, and which employees or departments follow each cadence.
Introduction
Now that you have completed your initial onboarding—starting with 🛠️ Creating an Account, moving through 🏢 Adding Company Info & Team, 📄 Setting Up Bank Info, and 🔍 Configuring Tax Docs, and Finalizing and Reviewing your settings, you are ready to take the next crucial step: defining your company’s pay schedules. This step is essential because it sets the timing and frequency of payroll runs that impact every employee payment.
Pay schedules allow your organization to reflect the real-world complexity of payroll timing, such as weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, or monthly payment cycles. They define pay periods, cutoff dates, and pay dates, which together orchestrate when and how funds flow from your linked bank accounts to your employees. Without properly configured pay schedules, timely payments and regulatory compliance become difficult, if not impossible.
The FlexPay interface provides an intuitive dashboard for managing these schedules, allowing you to customize each pay cycle and assign them to specific teams or departments. This flexibility ensures that part-time workers, contractors, or multiple business units can be paid according to their own timelines without confusion or delays.
Additionally, your role-based access control (RBAC) settings, introduced in the Admin Configuration group, govern who can view or modify pay schedules. This security layer protects sensitive payroll data and prevents unauthorized changes that might disrupt payroll processing.
Note: Changes to active pay schedules require careful handling. FlexPay provides warnings and version controls to ensure any edits maintain payroll integrity.
UI Overview: Pay Schedules Dashboard
The main dashboard displays all pay schedules currently configured in your system. Key information includes:
Pay Schedule
Frequency
Next Pay Date
Status
Assigned Groups
Weekly Payroll
Weekly
May 31, 2025
Active
Sales Team, Support Team
Biweekly Contract
Biweekly
June 7, 2025
Active
Contractors
Monthly Executive
Monthly
June 30, 2025
Scheduled
Executive Leadership
Table 1: Summary table of existing pay schedules including frequencies and assignments.
Each schedule entry includes controls for editing or deactivating schedules. When editing, FlexPay provides detailed forms for:
Specifying pay period start and end dates,
Setting cutoff deadlines for timesheet submissions, and
Determining pay dates for disbursing funds.
These controls are critical for ensuring payroll processing aligns with your operational calendar and regulatory obligations.
Building on Onboarding: Why This Matters
You might remember from Step 2 how you added teams and employees. Those users are now assigned to specific pay schedules here, making the connection between people and payment timing explicit.
Bank info configured in Step 3 ties directly into pay schedules, as funds flow through your designated accounts on the dates you set here. Any delays or errors in scheduling can cause payment failures, so this integration is vital.
Similarly, the tax documents you set in Step 4 depend on your pay periods to generate accurate filings and reports on time.
Your RBAC configuration ensures that only designated payroll administrators or managers can create or modify pay schedules, protecting against accidental or malicious changes.
💡 Best Practice: Regularly review your pay schedules to confirm they match your company’s evolving needs and labor laws.
Detailed View: Creating a New Pay Schedule
When creating a new schedule, you must carefully set:
Pay Frequency
Choose from weekly, biweekly, semimonthly, or monthly cycles.
Pay Period Start
The first day of the pay period (e.g., May 1, 2025).
Pay Period End
The last day of the pay period (e.g., May 15, 2025).
Cutoff Date
Deadline for timesheet or expense submission.
Pay Date
Date when funds will be disbursed to employees.
Assigned Groups
Teams or departments this schedule applies to.
Table 2: Key fields required when defining a pay schedule.
FlexPay provides validation to avoid conflicts like overlapping pay periods or cutoff dates after pay dates, minimizing payroll errors.
Common Scenarios and Tips
Organizations often require multiple pay schedules—for example, one for salaried employees paid monthly and another for hourly workers paid weekly. FlexPay’s flexible system supports this without complicating reporting or payments.
Cutoff dates are particularly important for ensuring all hours worked are captured before payroll runs. Communicate these deadlines clearly to managers and employees to avoid missing payroll cycles.
FlexPay will send reminder notifications as cutoff dates approach and generate reports to help payroll teams verify employee data before processing.
Summary
Defining pay schedules is a critical administrative task that lays the foundation for every payroll transaction. This step connects the people you added earlier, the banking information you set, and the tax documents you configured. Your schedules tell FlexPay when to run payroll, ensuring employees are paid accurately and on time.
Careful setup here reduces costly errors, avoids compliance issues, and streamlines your entire payroll process. With multiple schedules possible, FlexPay adapts to your organization’s complexity, supporting everything from hourly workers to executives.
Remember, your RBAC settings safeguard who can modify these schedules, preserving payroll integrity.
What’s Next?
The next configuration step is 👔 Customize Employee Roles. Here, you will tailor access and permissions for your users, building on the teams and schedules you've created. This step ensures only authorized users can perform sensitive payroll actions or access confidential data.
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