Running payroll from time clock to pay period

Sidebar: Team & Payroll → Payroll, with hours under Time Management.

What Alaga does and does not do

It works out what each person earned. Hours, overtime, commission, bonuses and deductions, ending at gross and net pay.

It does not pay anybody, and it does not file your taxes. There is no transfer to staff bank accounts and no submission to any tax authority. Alaga produces the figures; paying and reporting them happens in your payroll provider or your bank, exactly as before.

Be clear about that before you rely on it, and keep your accountant in the loop.

The path

1. Staff clock in and out. From their own device or a shared station. Breaks are recorded so they can come off the total.

2. Someone approves the hours. Under Time Management. This is the step that matters most and the one most often skipped — only approved time is paid. Unapproved entries are ignored by the run, so an unapproved week is a member of staff paid nothing.

Approve as you go, weekly. Approving a month at once means nobody remembers whether that eleven-hour Tuesday was real.

3. Pay profiles set the rates. Each person has a pay type and a rate — hourly or salary — plus their PTO and sick day allowance. Set these once per person.

4. Commission, if you use it. Commission plans are assigned to employees, and commission is earned from completed services. A day of work never marked complete pays no commission, which is another reason to close the day properly.

5. Run the payroll. Pick the period and run it. For each active employee with approved time, Alaga sums the hours, splits regular from overtime at 40 hours a week, applies the rate and the overtime multiplier, adds commission, applies any adjustments, and produces gross and net.

6. Check before you pay. Look at the totals per person against what you expect. The figures are only as good as the approvals and the rates behind them.

Adjustments

Bonuses, deductions and reimbursements are added to a run. Use these rather than editing hours to reach a number — an adjustment is visible and explainable months later, a fiddled timesheet is neither.

Common problems

• Someone was paid nothing. Their time was not approved.
• Hours look short. Missed clock-outs. A shift with no clock-out cannot be counted.
• No commission. The appointments were never marked completed, or no commission plan is assigned.
• Overtime looks wrong. It is calculated at 40 hours per week, not per pay period. A fortnightly period with 45 then 35 hours is 5 hours of overtime, not zero.

Practical advice

• Approve weekly. Everything downstream depends on it.
• Get pay profiles right before the first run, not during it.
• Keep the run. It is your record of how a figure was reached, which is what you will want if anyone queries their pay.