Biweekly Pay

What is biweekly pay?

What does biweekly pay means is one of the most commonly used pay periods by employers. The payments issued to employees are on the set day, every other week.

Since every calendar year has 52 weeks, the result is in a total of 26 payments per year, usually twice a month. In some scenarios, employees get paid three times in one month depending on the biweekly pay schedule.

What are the benefits of biweekly pay?

Here are some advantages of biweekly pay to both employees and employers.

For employees, these are:

  • More paydays: biweekly paycheck means employees will get two more pays per year than semi monthly pay, helping them to feel secure.
  • Better budgeting: employees will be able to plan the expenses when they can get a relatively consistent paycheck every two weeks.

For employers, there are:

  • Easier: it reduce the likelihood of payroll errors(compare with the semi monthly pay)
  • Time-saving: Updating payroll records in more convenient on a biweekly basis, and it will save time from processing payroll
  • Economical: If the payroll provider charges you per pay run, it will save the cost on HR spending.

Are there any disadvantages to biweekly pay?

In general, using the biweekly pay schedule is friendly for most of the organisations, especially with hourly rate and salaried employees. But there still are some cons of it you may need to know before you are choosing the pay cycle that best fits your business.

  • Make sure you have a good budget that works around your pay cycle as two months each year have three pay periods.
  • The bookkeeping might also be complicated because of the similar reason, you might need the HRM system that integrates with some accounting softwares like Xero to further streamline the workflow.
  • The cost might be higher if the payroll provider charges each pay run.

Workstem

Doing payroll is never easy. The robust payroll function of Workstem can automatically and accurately calculate all the pay items that are most likely to make mistakes for employers per day, week, fortnight (biweekly), month and also supports the flexible pay periods without the extra fee charge.

It also integrates with the accounting system Xero, syncs your payroll data automatically into Xero upon finalising a pay run, eliminating the need for manual data import/exports.