Holiday Bonus Best Practices

There's quite a bit of variety in the way we see our clients handle holiday bonuses, and we do see a LOT of holiday bonuses flow through here between Thanksgiving and Christmas each year. To help make the process more efficient and accurate, we've created a handy-dandy bonus checklist you can fill out and return to us prior to entering your bonus payroll information.

Once we've received the checklist from you, we can use that information to create your special run as well as any additional check types and/or payroll imports so you can get from Excel spreadsheet to completed bonus payroll in no-time flat.

Our recommendation for holiday bonus handling is that you plan to run the bonuses through as a special run (separate from your normal payroll) and that you import the bonuses rather than hand-keying them. As a best practice, you'll want to make sure you include employee numbers and pay group identifiers in any Excel spreadsheets you put together for your bonuses so that they can be easily imported. The easiest way to get a starting template is to go in iSolved to Payroll Processing -> Payroll Entry Setup -> Time Entry Options.

On the right side of the page, the third section down is "Create Employee Time Import Spreadsheet". Select a Time Entry Template from the drop-down and an Employee Filter, then click "Create Time Import Spreasheet" to create your starting Excel file. It will have the employee number, name, pay group, and whatever earnings codes were in the Time Entry Template you chose.

Once you've entered all the bonuses in your template, you can return it (along with your completed checklist) to our service team for some additional tweaks and final importing. We'll notify you when the import is complete so that you can run your preview, verify all of the information, and process the payroll.