What if I get halfway through editing pays and then realise I have to quit to fix up an employee’s settings?

You’ll recognise the frustration behind this question if this has ever happened to you. You’re processing the week’s pays, going through and editing hours and pay for each employee one by one, when you get near the bottom of the list and realise that the settings for one of the employees are wrong. You have to quit from the Process Payroll window, losing all the changes that you’ve just made.

Right now, there’s no neat solution to this problem. However, if you find yourself halfway through a pay run and you realise that the settings for an employee are wrong, try the following:

1. See if you can change the pay itself. For example, if the hourly rate has gone up from $15 to $16, do the sums on a calculator and edit the amounts. (You can edit the hourly rate for this employee later, once you’ve finished processing pays.)
2. If you can’t change the pay (maybe a pay category isn’t coming up), just unclick this employee for the time being, as if you’re not going to pay them at all. Continue editing the rest of the employees’ pays as normal.  
3. Continue to the Process Payments window but when you get there, click Close rather than Next.
4. Return to your card file and fix up the employee’s settings.
5. Return to Process Payroll and select Process individual employee. Enter the employee’s name that you didn’t pay the first time around.
6. Check the employee’s pay is okay now and continue to the Process Payments window. At this point, both the previous batch of pays and the individual pay you just recorded will be ready to process. From here, you can print paycheques or prepare electronic payments for the whole batch in one go.