When Not to Adjust a Paycheck
Before diving into the process of adjusting a paycheck, it’s first important to understand when an adjustment is appropriate.
- Adjustments should not be used to issue additional or missing wages to an employee. In most cases of underpayment, running a Special Payrun is the appropriate way to issue those wages.
- Adjustments should rarely be used if funds have not yet been dispersed to the employee. Instead, it is often better to void the prior paycheck and instead initiate a replacement check.
- Adjustments are commonly the correct process to follow when:
- An employee was overpaid (perhaps due to either an incorrect flat-amount or an incorrect number of hours worked).
- An employee had an incorrect work location, which then caused incorrect tax calculations.
- An employee was assigned incorrect benefit or deduction codes, or the codes they were assigned were not themselves correct.
- An employee had incorrect information that impacted the paycheck, such as an outdated salary or a missing garnishment order.
Overview of Adjustment Paychecks in Greenshades
In the Greenshades system, adjusting a paycheck is straightforward. Users will select the pay run and then the paycheck(s) that need adjustment, be presented with the original information on those paychecks, and be prompted to provide the correct information for those checks. This process of prompting for the “correct” information is different from older payroll systems that would require users to calculate a differential check that would then be applied alongside the original check. Within the Greenshades system, the user is prompted for the desired or correct information, and then Greenshades will automatically generate the differential check by comparing the original check vs. the now-desired check.
The Greenshades system will properly account for changes in hours, codes, locations, minimum wages, and more when generating the differential check. This saves users a significant amount of time and also eliminates many simple calculation errors that are easy to make when manually calculating differentials.
Steps to Adjust a Paycheck
Step 1:
Locate the original pay run that contained the incorrect check(s) and click the “Adjust” link. Users may find these pay runs using the “Recent Pay Runs” section of the main Payroll page, or by clicking into “View All” to select from a list of all prior pay runs.
Step 2:
On the dialog that appears, provide the reason for adjustment, and then select a valid reason to use the adjustment process:
Step 3:
Select each of the employees from that pay run whose checks need to be adjusted:
Step 4:
Greenshades will then show the standard pay-run wizard, loaded with the specific employees that you selected to adjust and populated with the information as it was for the original pay run. Each of the sections will be populated in this way, allowing you to see exactly what was entered on the original check.
Note that the name of the pay run will be marked as “Adjusted” and the user will be presented a banner advising on how to edit this information.
Step 5:
Make changes to any of the employees within this pay run, altering the information to be what it should have been originally. For instance, if an employee was originally paid for 40 hours but should have been paid for 32, then simply enter 32 hours. Do not enter a new 8 hour transaction. If an employe was paid in Montana, but should have been paid in Mississippi, then simply adjust the existing entry to show Mississippi. Users may adjust any fields on any of the steps of the payroll wizard.
Step 6:
The final page of an adjustment pay run wizard is “Review Adjustments”. Here, a user will see the differential paychecks that have been generated based on the changes they have made on the prior screens. In calculating these differential checks, Greenshades will take into account changes to deduction/benefit calculations, taxation changes, minimum wage adjustments, and more. If an adjustment would result in a negative earning, it will be placed into an earning arrear as part of the normal arrears functionality with Greenshades Payroll.
To see the original check and the desired check that generated the adjustment checks, users may click the carat on the left side of the table to expand the adjustment check row:
Step 7:
When satisfied, users may complete this adjustment pay run using the same process as completing a standard pay run.
Adjusting a Paycheck that has Previously Been Adjusted
Please note that an adjustment pay run itself may not be adjusted. If a further change is required, the user should return to the original check and once again enter the amounts/information that are desired. Greenshades will take all prior adjustment checks into account when generating the new adjustment checks.
As an example, suppose an employee has been corrected from 40 hours to 32 hours, with Greenshades generating an adjustment paycheck of -8 hours. If a user later realizes that the employee should always have been at 35 hours, then they should return to the original 40-hour paycheck and enter a desired amount of 35 hours. Greenshades will see the prior adjustment of -8 hours, and will generate a new +3 hour adjustment so that the employee is paid for 35 hours.
The rule remains the same: when using the payroll adjustment wizard, always enter the amounts that the employee should have received originally and let the Greenshades system generated the differentials.