TriPay Payroll FAQ

About TriPay

System Overview

The TriPay payroll system is designed to run within the TransSys user environment either as a standalone application or seamlessly integrated with TriPer Personnel and/or TriAcc Nominal Ledger. It is a well established system that processes hundreds of thousands of payslips each year in businesses all over the UK.

TriPay can be run for any number of independent companies, each containing any number of separate payrolls of either monthly, weekly, fortnightly or weekly pay frequency. Salaried and hourly paid employees can be mixed within each payroll, as can the multiple payment methods, and the user has complete freedom to create as many pay and deduction elements as they need.

Main features of TriPay:

Unlimited employees: employee keys up to 6 digits in length, containing any alphabetic or numeric character;
Employees can be assigned department and category codes which can be used as sort and selection criteria throughout the system;
Unlimited user-definable pay elements: pay components may be up to 4 digits in length, containing any alphabetic or numeric character, with a free-text description for printing on payslips and reports;
Multiple payment methods mixed within each payroll: cash, cheque, credit transfer/giro, BACS, BOBS, AutoPay and Telepay, including split payment types;
Multiple bank accounts: up to 9 accounts per employee with variable splits on net pay;
Multiple pension schemes of all types including stakeholder and Group Personal Pension;
Alphasearch lookup on all key fields: employee, department, component of pay;
Context-sensitive helptext throughout;
Pay rates can be linked to the employee's grade, shift or pay table;
Components can be dependent on others, deriving their values from arithmetic formulae e.g. overtime at time and a half linked to basic pay, so that when basic changes, the overtime rate is automatically adjusted;
Totally flexible build up to gross pay: components can be based on time x rate or a monetary value, added on the fly for bonuses etc or set up as permanent items like basic pay;
Process an individual, a department or the whole payroll as many times as you like;
Rolling twelve-month on-line history - copy each tax year out to an archive company and retain the data indefinitely;
Automatically audits changes and produces exception reports at each key stage of processing to ensure errors and omissions can be trapped;
TransSys fully-featured user environment providing flexible security facilities, spooler and printer queue maintenance, dictionary builder and report generator, exports to desktop applications and a host of other user and developer utilities.

TriPay is an evolving product and is continually being enhanced with new features and other improvements. Many of these arise from user suggestions. We always appreciate feedback, even if it is critical, because it helps us to make our applications more beneficial to all our users.

How to print a manual

The TriPay system is fully documented throughout and incorporates context-sensitive helptext at every level, which can be accessed by entering "?" in any field or at any menu. This online documentation forms the application's user manual, which may be generated and printed off at any time by anyone with a suitable level of access.

Manuals may be printed on a laser printer in either single-sided or double-sided form, or generated as HTML for viewing with a browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer.

To generate the manual, type PAYMAN at the "Enter Option" prompt at any menu (type /PAYMAN if you are using drop-down menus) and follow the options on screen.

The contents of the manual will be appropriate to the access level of the user generating it: they will only see the manual sections that relate to the menus and programs that they can access within the system.

We strongly recommend that a new manual is printed once a year or after a major system update. Online help is added automatically to each new feature incorporated into the system, so it makes sense to keep your offline reference as up to date as possible.

TriPay Basics

This section covers the basic steps required to run a payroll using the TriPay system. It tells you which options you cannot do without, and makes some recommendations about things you should do to maintain at least a minimum audit trail.

This is intended as a basic guide only, and assumes some familiarity with TriPay and TransSys. For more detailed information about the various programs mentioned, see your TriPay User Manual.

Step 1: Starters, Leavers & Changes

The first thing you should do each period is check whether you have any employee changes to process. This could mean setting up new starters, entering leaving dates for leavers, making tax code changes, setting up tax credits, recovery of student loans etc. You should also make any changes to permanent components, rates of pay etc before you start the input.

Step 2: Input

Process your input for the period. Which program you use is up to you - there are several to choose from. We would recommend that you use Full Pay Input [PFI] on Menu 74, as that displays all the components an employee has at any time, and allows you to enter all types of pay (additions, deductions, SSP, SMP, SAP, SPP, holiday pay). In addition you will need to use Employee Component Maintenance [PEP] to add or remove permanent components and set up repayments/reducing balances.

When you have completed your input, you might want to print it out using the Full Pay Input Report [PFL] for checking. This is optional, you can do the same checking using the Calculation Proof List [PPR] below.

Step 3: Calculation

You must run the Payslip Calculation [PCP] - this is the program which performs the gross-to-net calculation and generates an exception report showing any problem employees. Print the exception report and check it over carefully. If there are any exceptions, investigate and correct them, then re-calculate the affected individuals. Sometimes it can be quicker just to recalculate the entire payroll. You will get another exception report, which should also be printed and checked.

Step 4: Proofing

You don't have to do this, but you probably should. Listing paper is cheaper than payslip stationery, so run off a Calculation Proof List [PPR] before you do your payslips. This will give you the gross-to-net breakdown for each employee and show you what their net pay will be. It will allow you to spot any glaring errors such as 10 hours overtime entered as 100 hours by mistake, if you did not run an input listing to check before calculation. If you find anything that looks wrong, you can go back to the input program and re-key the affected employees, then recalculate, then re-do the proof listing.

If you just want to quickly spot-check that a particular employee has recalculated as expected, you can review their gross-to-net on screen with Calculation Results Enquiry [PRP].

Step 5: Payslips

You must run the Payslip Print [PPP] to produce payslips and advance the employees' statuses to the next stage. You can't do a payment run without first producing payslips. You can re-print individuals or whole departments if the printer fouls up.

Step 6: Payment

You must perform a payment run of some kind in order to advance the employees' statuses ready for period end - even if you are paying your staff through a third-party application such as an external BACS link. What you run will depend on how you are paying your employees.

Payment Method	Type	Program to Run
Cash	CSH	Coin Analysis [PCA]
Cheque	CQE	Cheque Print [PCH]
Giro/Credit Transfer	CTR	Credit Transfer Print [PCT]
Autopay	CTR	Autopay Listing [PAL]
Telepay	CTR	Telepay Listing [PTL]
BOBS (Branch Originated BACS Service)	BOB	BOBS listing [PBL]
BACS	BAC	BACS Payment Run [PBPR] (see note below)

Note for BACS users: If you are using a third-party BACS application such as WinBACS, Microbank etc the BACS Payment Run [PBPR] will generate a comma-separated file that you can upload directly into your BACS software for transmission. Please contact us to make sure we offer a compatible layout, since different applications require the columns in a different order, or specific header/footer records.

Whichever payment option you use, you will get a total net pay for all the employees processed. You should check this against the total net pay on the Calculation Proof List. Any imbalance indicates that one or more employees failed to be processed by the payment run, which you will need to investigate. This assumes you haven't altered anyone's pay since the Proof List was run. The most common cause of payment failure is having wrong/incomplete bank details on an employee set up to be paid by some kind of direct credit such as giro or BACS.

Step 7: Reports

Which reports you run each period is entirely up to you, but as a minimum we recommend that you produce the Payroll Analysis [PNA] and Pension Fund Report [PPF] (or one of several variations thereof) if you have a pension scheme.

The Payroll Analysis gives you departmental and company summary of all the pay and deductions, and the Yellow Book breakdown. Make sure you print at least this report, because once you run the Period End Closedown all the current period data will be transferred to the cumulatives and you don't have such a wide choice of reports from the history as you do from the period-based employee data.

Now is also a good time to take a backup!

Step 8: Period End

The Period End Closedown [PUP] program clears out the current period data, updates the cumulatives and rolls the employees over into the next tax period. It also generates a file of nominal ledger transactions, if your payroll is linked to your nominal ledger.

This is, effectively, your point of no return. At any of the previous stages you could start an employee over again from the input point, and repeat the steps until you are happy with the results. Once you have "PUPed", you have to start restoring from tapes or other backups if you want to start again.

Running the Period End Closedown automatically generates an exception report which will tell you whether or not the closedown was successful. If it succeeded, you are ready to start your next period's processing. If it failed, read the exception messages on the report to find out which employees are affected and what has gone wrong. Take whatever action is necessary to solve the problems, and run PUP again. The employees who closed successfully the first time around will be ignored, and the system will process the rest. Again, check your exception report for success or failure.

FAQ updated March 2004