I’ve had several calls recently from people trying to do payroll, but for some employees there are no pay fields showing in Payroll Entry. As a result there’s nowhere to enter the employee’s pay. The solution is simple, but far from obvious so I thought it would be a good topic to cover here.
In certain situations this happens after installing the latest Sage 50 update (version 2021.1.01) and is related to enhancements that were made to payroll in this release. It occurs when you have a salaried employee with their salary set to 0.00. This would be common with a commissioned employee. Since the commission will change every pay period there’s no point in entering a standard amount in Maintain Employees.
How do you fix it?
Obviously one solution is to enter a salary amount in Maintain Employees. But if you wanted that, you probably would have done it already and never experienced this problem. So the better, but not so obvious solution, is to bring up that employee in Maintain Employees, go to the Pay Info tab, and clear the checkbox in the Use Defaults column for the pay types that you want to have available in Payroll Entry.
Why is this happening?
Sage 50 payroll has always been limited to 20 hourly and 20 salary pay types. But when the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) mandated that many employers had to provide emergency medical leave, the best way to track that was with additional pay fields. The problem was that many Sage 50 users were already using all of the available pay types. So with version 2021.1 Sage added the ability to have an unlimited number of pay types (each employee is still limited to 20). In order to keep a huge number of pay fields from suddenly showing up in Payroll Entry, the side effect of this enhancement was that salary pay types now only appear in Payroll Entry if the employee has an amount assigned to that pay type, or if the Use Defaults box is unchecked.
If you haven’t installed the Sage 50 2021.1.01 update yet, but sure to watch for this issue after upgrading.
