A Walkthrough of Employee Maintenance Changes in the New Payroll
As Bob Dylan famously said (and won a Nobel Prize for), “The times, they are a-changin’.” We can see change all around us every day, but one of the places where changes are most apparent in our businesses is documentation. Simply put, we need a lot of notes on our employees these days. From remote workers to in-depth ACA reports, to job transfers and more, tracking employee actions and needs gets harder and harder as time passes and a business grows.
Until now.
The all-new Payroll 2.0 contains many time-saving and efficiency increasing differences from its earlier counterpart, and due to the many changes you need for employee updates, one of the areas that you most requested changes in was Employee Maintenance. Let’s take a deep dive in to all those “a-changin’” updates so you can familiarize yourself with Payroll 2.0.
Basics
When Sage decides to redesign a product, they take that task seriously. From the opening screens all the way through reporting and beyond, the Payroll 2.0 experience features a lot of innovation. When you log in to your payroll system’s Employee Maintenance options, the first things you’ll notice are:
- 8 tabs – Main, Additional, Benefits, Taxes, Pay Defaults, Earnings, Deductions, and Pay History
- “More” button – Quick links to ACA Employee Maintenance, Direct Deposit bank account setup, Employee Renumbering, and Tax Summary
- Name fields – 40 characters in first and last names, plus 25 characters in the new Middle Name field and 4 in the new Suffix field
- Contact info – 2 phone numbers instead of one, with clarity on the primary number you should use
Note that you can now delete employees if you made an entry error, but you cannot delete employees with payroll history.
The Tabs – In Detail
With eight tabs now – and changes in each tab – this blog post could turn into an entire book! However, you’re too busy to read a whole book on Employee Maintenance in Payroll (assuming it was even an interesting book), so we’re going to keep this fast. See below to check out a summary of changes in each tab. Of course, if you have any questions, please contact ISM to get the answers you need quickly.
Main
This tab now helps you track employee history, such as transfer or promotions, as well as current hourly status, such as full-time or part-time hours.
Additional
Added demographic data now fits in this tab, which includes comprehensive marital status, veteran status, ethnicity, location, and another emergency contact.
Benefits
Avoid typing errors with new, locked, information-only benefits lookup in this tab, plus benefits details for the current year and history, as well as time-off / benefits auto-calculations for eligibility and carryover. If you’re looking for more benefits information, the monthly drill down will help.
Note that the time-off classifications in this section match the new time off names you created in Payroll 2.0 setup.
Taxes
A lot has changed in the taxes tab, so we’ll leave that for a future post. Check back for our detailed blog post on Tax Changes in Payroll 2.0.
Pay Details
This tab helps you specify which details to include on your paychecks, such as employee name, pay summaries on stubs, and pay code options. (There are nine pay codes now!)
Earnings
Look up quarters, year to date, and a monthly drill down for fast employee answers at your fingertips.
Deductions
This tab, like “Earnings,” provides fast answers for quarterly, YTD, and monthly amounts per employee.
Pay History
Help your employees answer questions fast, or get answers to your own queries with detailed pay history lookup organized by employment year. You can also use the Quick Search feature to look up specific checks or direct deposits by date, check number, or gross wages.
Summing It All Up
As you can tell, a lot has changed in Payroll 2.0, and it’s clear that Bob Dylan’s famous song was correct in its predictions. However, though some of the changes that Bob referenced, er, weren’t that good, we can assure you that the Payroll 2.0 changes are great – and they’ll help you streamline your employee data in your payroll system like never before.