Pay Adjustments: 5 Steps to Seamlessly Change Pay

As an employer, it can feel good to provide employees with raises or bonuses. A business also might need to make a temporary payroll adjustment, such as a correction to an overpayment. Either way, it’s important to carry out this function properly for wage and hour compliance and morale. When you run payroll, double check the employee’s wages to make sure you correctly made the changes.

  • Regardless, the first step should always be to acknowledge the request and let them know you will review it.
  • Review the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (EPA), The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
  • Social Security gets most of its revenue from payroll taxes, and each year, the maximum wage base on which Social Security payroll taxes get charged generally goes up.
  • These systems enable you to record and store all information automatically, which helps the HR team closely monitor processes and with greater accuracy.

Deposit all withheld payroll taxes and employer-matched taxes at a bank that is authorized to handle these transactions. This step is handled by your payroll processor, if you have outsourced this service. Use IRS tax tables to determine the amount of taxes to be withheld from employee gross pay. This step is handled automatically, if you are using payroll software. Retro pay is typically counted as a supplemental wage, which describes any additional (or supplemental) compensation.

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If you have payroll software, it will be as easy as entering the new amount. However, if you’re doing it manually, you’ll have to recalculate gross pay, deductions and contributions, and net pay. It’s worth noting that some industries are not covered by FLSA, such as agriculture. If this is the case, be sure to check any industry-specific laws that might impact pay adjustments, like the Agricultural Worker Protection Act (AWPA).

Set aside copies of this information in order to include it in the next payroll. It’s imperative to include retro pay on pay stubs, so that it’s evidenced in your employee records. Retroactive operating income pay, more often shortened to retro pay, is a type of compensation. Typically, retro pay is owed to an employee for any work commenced from a previous pay period, such as the month before.

  • This template provides a simple way to manage vacation and sick leave for each employee.
  • Whether you’re making promotions, trying to retain an employee, or going through budget cuts, you may need to adjust compensation in your company.
  • Human error is commonplace, especially when entering data and numbers manually.
  • If you are making a pay adjustment, it is crucial that you carefully consider how you will communicate this to affected workers.
  • For easy planning, create a payroll schedule showing all twelve months of the year.

Document and authorize payroll changes and reasons for the adjustments with this form. Changes may happen for a number of reasons, from starting new employment to getting a promotion or leaving a job. After completing the appropriate sections and getting required signatures, you can also add comments at the bottom of the form for further explanation. Keep track of vacation and sick hours used and accrued with this Excel payroll template. The spreadsheet is separated into sections showing hours per pay period, cumulative hours accrued, and hours currently available.

It can be easy to make errors in processing payroll, especially with manual data entry. Payroll processing software can be a great way to help reduce data entry errors and ensure payroll compliance. Payroll Adjustment Forms are change forms used in increasing or decreasing an employee’s gross pay.

In this case, rates of pay would likely increase across your industry, and you might need to make pay adjustments to be competitive. If employees within your organization are doing the same job but earning different amounts, a pay adjustment may be necessary. As well as being fair to your employees, this may be a legal requirement. If you fail to pay your employees fairly, you risk allegations of discrimination, which could result in legal action against your business. When a worker receives a demotion, they may also receive lower compensation to reflect their new position. As demotions are often difficult for both employees and businesses, you may want to seek legal advice when making such pay adjustments.

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Employers must withhold the additional Medicare tax from wages of employees earning more than $200,000 in a calendar year. These wage thresholds, set by law, do not adjust for inflation and therefore apply to more employees each year. The changes were first announced by the IRS in its annual adjustment report published last month. Be sure to check with your state for more information on overpayment recovery do’s and don’ts.

But being a very young company, there are still a number of things that you lack, including documents such as the Payroll Adjustment Form. In the search for such a document, you scoured the vastness of the internet and, luckily, came across this article. Upon reading this article, you learned what a Payroll Adjustment Form is about, along with interesting things that are tied with it.

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Typically, making a prior-period adjustment is required when correcting an error in an employee’s rate of pay or hours worked. But you may also need to make a prior-period adjustment if you have wrongly classified a worker within your business. If your employees belong to a union, they are likely protected by collective bargaining rules. You will therefore need to negotiate employment terms such as pay adjustments for groups of workers through the union. All adjustments to your payroll system should be made in a timely manner. Remember, you will need to take any relevant deductions or taxes into account when making these changes.

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In certain scenarios, such as miscalculating an employee’s compensation, a shortfall is created, and a retroactive payment must be provided. There are numerous situations in which you may need to increase or even decrease an employee’s rate of pay. If there has previously been an error with an employee’s compensation, you may need to make a prior-period adjustment. Any decisions that you make in relation to pay need to be fair and free from bias. This means that you cannot make adjustments to pay based on a person’s race, gender, religion, sexuality, medical history, or age. Consider a company that predominantly offers merit increases to younger workers, for instance.

What do we mean when we talk about payment adjustments?

Also, you have to follow the rules to determine between nonexempt and exempt employees. You should pay overtime wages to the nonexempt employees although you don’t have to give overtime wages to the exempt workers. When adjusting the wages of an employee, the employee could go from nonexempt to exempt, or the other way around.

There are, however, many other reasons your company may decide to make a pay adjustment. These adjustments can relate to a single employee or group of employees. Read on to find out reasons you might make a pay adjustment, what to watch out for, and how to communicate the change with your employees. A pay adjustment is a change to the compensation an employee receives for working on behalf of your business.