While everyone is winding down and celebrating at company parties, payroll experts are focused on initiatives for the upcoming year. To make this time as efficient as possible, here’s a year-end payroll checklist that should hopefully streamline the process.

Ensure that all paychecks have been properly recorded. For human resources, it’s imperative that all payments for commissions, additional fees for workers, and anything that is external to regular payroll are correctly recorded. This includes handwritten and voided paychecks.

Verify and double-check wages and benefits. Take a closer look at wages and any deductions. The correct pay rate needs to be listed for each employee, double-checking that their benefits and their deductions are exact. Any discrepancies should be reported to employers and employees. If the discrepancies stem from the onboarding process, then it should be revised to prevent future employees from obtaining wrongful information about pay rates or benefits.

For salaried workers, look up sick days and vacation time. For each employee, see how many days they have used. For the remaining days, inquire with the specific employee as to if they want to roll over their off time to next year or cash it out. Or if you are under a mandate where an employee needs to use it or lose it, notify each employee of how much time they have left to finalize a decision.

Latest software updates. As a human resource professional, you use several tools to automate many of your everyday tasks. From cloud-based solutions to onboarding processes using the intranet, many tools need to be updated to ensure that they work seamlessly, as well as patched against the latest security risks. Install the latest updates, and complete a year-end test process so you can identify and correct errors.

Set employee compensation before the new year comes. Some of your employees will deserve pay raises for the next year. Determine how much the raise will be, and calculate the cost of compensation and associated taxes. Keep in mind that there are about ten states that are raising minimum wages in 2021 and beyond. Your state might be one of them, and you will need to be aware of the tax-related ramifications