New Year, New Schedule

Get ahead of the game by adding your new fiscal year in General Ledger and new schedules in Payroll

The first things I recommend setting up to prepare for a new year is the Fiscal Year within General Ledger and Schedule(s) within Payroll. By establishing a Fiscal Year and schedule, you are letting Financial Edge recognize the new year. This task can be done at any time, so it will be easy to cross this off the year end to-do list.

Fiscal year set up is located within General Ledger's Configuration. Once in Configuration, select Fiscal Years. To create a new fiscal year, select New Fiscal Year and enter both the Fiscal Year ID and Description. I suggest keeping the ID and Description similar year over year for consistency. Example: Fiscal Year ID: 2015 and Description: Fiscal Year 2015.

To let the program do some of the work for you, after entering in the ID and description, click Copy From and choose the last year. This will copy the period format from the prior year. If your periods are different this year than the last, you can choose to manually enter the dates in the period grid instead.Once we have the dates entered, Save and Close record. The new year has been made within The Financial Edge and you may now cross one more item off of your to-do list!

Now, all my folks with our Payroll module - let’s cross another item off of our list while we are on a roll.  Next, we can create our Payroll Schedule(s) for the new year. Schedules establish the new year’s period end dates. We can update existing schedules that will be using the same pay frequency and pattern or generate unique schedules.

If you already have pay schedules set up and only need to update them with your new year, this process can be done in a few clicks of the mouse. We will navigate into Payroll’s Configuration and choose Schedules. We can highlight the schedule ID you would like to copy into the new year. From the action bar, click Copy from. This will populate a window with the Schedule ID’s information from last year, but updated with the next year’s dates.

I like using the Copy from option because it automatically picks up the same Schedule ID and does more work for you. By keeping our Schedule ID the same as the last years’, the employees’ records will recognize the new year for their assigned schedules. This means we will not have to assign new schedules. It also means that any pay type/benefit/deduction set to pay/deduct/etc. on period end dates according to employee’s default schedule will automatically pick up the new schedule. Talk about a time saver!

If you are creating a brand new schedule, the steps are a little different. Once in the Schedule area of Configuration, select New Schedule from the action bar. After selecting your new, unique Schedule ID and entering your description, choose the remaining information such as your Pay frequency, number of periods and start date. After verifying your selections, click Update grid in the dark gray toolbar. You can preview the schedule set up on the grid on the right.

Today we looked at creating a new fiscal year in General Ledger and a new schedule in Payroll. Stay tuned throughout the tax season for new blog posts about The Financial Edge.