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Payroll Frequency and Change Considerations

Written by Drivestream Staff | 9/20/22 12:57 PM

Pay Frequency (synonymous with Pay Period) is, quite simply, how often employees are paid – e.g., every week, every two weeks, twice a month, every month, etc. (Note that this is different from Compensation Frequency, which is the unit of time that defines an employee’s pay rate – e.g., amount per hour for hourly employees, amount per year for salaried employees, or amount per contract term for employees paid under a contract). 

In Oracle Cloud HCM, Pay Frequency is defined by the Pay Definition business object. Out of the box, you can configure Pay Definition with any of the following Period Types: Annually, Bi-monthly, Bi-weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Semi-annually, Semi-monthly, Weekly, and Weekly FLSA

These Period Types represents Pay Frequency, not to be confused with Compensation Frequency. Download the paper where you can read more about the compensation frequency in the section “Reference - Compensation Frequency”. Keep in mind that you can have a Pay Frequency to pay both Hourly and Salaried employees. For Hourly employees, the system will automatically accumulate wages from the bottom up, multiplying hours worked by the hourly rate to yield the gross pay amount. For Salaried employees, whose salary is perhaps defined as amount per year, the system will prorate according to configuration preferences – for example, by dividing the annual salary by the number of pay periods in a year to yield the gross pay amount for a pay period.

Changing pay frequency is a big project, at any point in time for organizations. When organizations introduce a new payroll system, timing the change can be challenging.  Sometimes even if one employee is dissatisfied with the change, the entire project may be perceived as a failure. Even worse, the business may be perceived by its employees as less caring.

Download the paper, Pay Frequency and Change Considerations, written by Judy Huang Vice President, Strategy & Advisory, Drivestream, to learn about what your organization may want to consider when adjusting pay frequencies.