As an employer, you want to make sure your employees get paid on time, every time! If you are writing your own checks, you can do this on payday no problem. If you have direct deposit for your employees, there are wait times you need to be aware of.
One important note before getting started: Once you issue pay stubs to your employees, you cannot change the frequency your employees are paid. Meaning, if your employees are paid biweekly, you can't change this to pay them monthly. For more information, see Why can't I change my payroll frequency?
Writing your own checks
If you plan to write your own checks, you can do this on payday or in advance.
- You will need to run payroll before you write checks. In the left-hand navigation menu, select Payroll > Run Payroll. From there, when you are ready, click Run payroll.
- After you have run payroll, click the Approved Payrolls button to view pay stubs for previous payrolls. Locate the payroll you want to see and click the dates to view details.
- Click Print checks.
- You can select the employees you want to pay by check. Note: You can set up direct deposit for some employees while writing checks for others.
- When you're ready, click Print.
Print out a few test pages before using actual checks in your printer.
Direct deposit for your employees
If you have direct deposit set up, there is a waiting period. This is because it takes time to receive your request, verify the funds in your account, and move the funds to your employees' accounts. Keep in mind that all of this has to happen within normal banking hours. This means payday can't happen on weekends or bank holidays.
- The daily deadline to run payroll is 3:00pm Eastern. If you miss this deadline, your payroll will not be run until the next day.
- You can expect employees to be paid 3 business days after you have ran the payroll.
- If you want to, you can run payroll in advance. Wave will only withdraw the money from your account 3 days before payday.
Example time!
Let's say your direct deposit is already activated and verified, and your employee's payday is November 1st. In order for your employee to be paid on time, you need to run your payroll on October 29th before 3:00pm Eastern. Notice that's three business days before payday, and before the cut-off time.
If you feel confident you'll have your employees paid on time, you can move onto the next article in getting started: What do I do about payroll taxes?