Prepay Payroll

What Prepay Is For

Sometimes a production pays someone directly — outside Greenroom — before that person's regular pay period comes around. Common reasons:

A prepay run puts that already-made payment into Greenroom's records and, when applicable, calculates and remits the payroll taxes on it. It does not initiate a new payment.

Creating a Prepay Run

You need the Admin or Payroll role to create or edit this run and send it for approval. An Approver can review and approve a run they did not prepare. The approval that completes your company's required approvals submits the run automatically; see Processing Payroll.

1. Choose Run Payroll in the sidebar (or Run payroll on the History page).
2. Start a new run and choose Prepay as the run type.
3. Pick the pay period the recorded payment applies to, and the check date.
4. In Employees & Loan-outs, re-include the payees whose outside payments you're recording — a prepay run starts with everyone excluded, the same as off-cycle.
5. Enter the amounts that were actually paid outside Greenroom.

Greenroom keeps one prepay run per pay period. Starting another prepay for a period that already has one takes you to the existing run instead of creating a second.

How Double-Pay Protection Works

Because a prepay records money that already moved, Greenroom needs to make sure that same person and period never gets paid again through a later regular run. It does this automatically:

1. Prepay recorded — you re-include the payee and enter what they were actually paid outside the system.
2. A regular run is created (or already exists) for an overlapping period — Greenroom checks every prepay run that overlaps that period.
3. The prepaid payee is excluded automatically — on the regular run, that payee is marked excluded with a visible reason: "Prepaid in [run code] ([period]) — already paid for this period". This is never a silent removal; the exclusion and its reason are shown on the run so whoever is reviewing it can see exactly why that payee isn't included.

This is exclusion, not netting — the regular run does not calculate "regular pay minus the prepay amount." The prepaid payee simply doesn't get a second payment for the same period through Greenroom.

While the prepay is still open (Draft or In review), removing a payee from it (Remove from run (keeps entries) on their row) lifts the exclusion straight away: any open regular run for the period puts that payee back. A prepay can also be deleted while it's a draft, with Delete draft in its header (one In review goes back to Draft first; see Payroll Run Status): the payees it held out of other open payrolls go back into them, and those payrolls are recalculated and need approving again. On the regular run itself, Re-include in run also overrides the exclusion, and Greenroom leaves your choice alone after that.

Tax Handling

For W-2 employees, Greenroom calculates and remits the payroll taxes owed on the recorded amount using the same tax engine as a regular run. Loan-out, contractor and vendor payments carry no employee tax withholding (see Vendors and Contractors).

Fees

A prepay run carries no platform fee at all: no base charge, no per-payee charge, and no weekly minimum. The reasoning: a prepay only records payment and taxes for a period that hasn't run for real yet. The actual platform fee bills later, when that period is processed as a regular payroll — charging a fee on the prepay too would double-bill the same period. A custom fee arrangement Greenroom sets for your company doesn't change this: a prepay is still $0. See Platform Fees & Billing for the full fee model.

Processing Steps

Prepay runs go through the same steps as every other run type, Union Reports included only where unions are in play:

Best Practices

• Only record what was actually paid outside Greenroom — a prepay is a record, not a way to issue an early payment
• Re-include only the payees whose outside payment you're documenting; leave everyone else excluded
• Double-check the pay period the prepay is tied to — that's what drives the later exclusion on the regular run
• When the regular run for that period comes around, confirm the prepaid payees show the exclusion reason rather than re-adding them manually
• If a prepay was recorded in error, delete it while it's still a draft, or remove its payees while it's still open, so the exclusion it caused doesn't linger on other runs

Next Steps

Return to the Payroll Introduction for an overview of all payroll types, or see Creating a Payroll Run for standard payroll creation.