Technical Support Blog

Reopening Closed Payroll Periods

In order to use your employee time clock software effectively, it's important to understand the role of closing payroll periods. Closing payroll periods performs two functions:

Virtual TimeClock calculates and writes the total hours, overtime, and gross wages for the current payroll period to your time clock software database.

Virtual TimeClock advances the current payroll period to the next period using your payroll cycle settings.

Why Closing Payroll Periods Is ImportantWhen viewing or printing timecards, Virtual TimeClock will always use the stored totals from a closed period rather than recalculating the totals again. This is important because wages, overtime, and time deduction rules may change over time. By closing payroll periods, reports for a closed period use the historical totals rather than calculating them all over again using the current settings for each worker which may have changed.

Reopening A Closed Payroll PeriodRemember that closing a payroll period causes all of the totals for the period to be written to the database. Therefore, your time clock software will not allow you to add, modify, or delete entries in a closed period in order to preserve the integrity of the totals for that period.

If you need to perform edits to timecards in a closed payroll period, you'll need to reopen the period. From the Tools menu, choose Payroll Period. In the Current Period section, enter the start and ending dates of the payroll period you want to reopen. Save the changes, make your timecards edits, and close the period again.