In most states, you’re legally required to provide pay stubs to your employees.
They’re also useful pieces of information for both you and your workers, so they’re worth doing whether you have to or not.
Read on to learn how to nail a perfect excel pay stub template.
Pay Stubs 101
Pay stubs are part of a paycheck that itemizes wages earned, taxes paid, and other deductions. They also show total net and gross wages.
Why Should I Use Pay Stubs?
Pay stubs are an important payroll tool for your business. They help you keep accurate records, easily detect errors within your payroll, and do your taxes.
They also help employees understand their wages and deductions and can be used by both parties to settle pay-related disputes.
What Should a Pay Stub Include?
Requirements for pay stub info vary by state, but the more information you provide, the more helpful this little slip of paper will be.
Generally, a pay stub should include the following:
- Employer name
- Employee information
- name
- address
- social security number
- Date of issue and payment period
- Rate of pay
- Gross earnings
- Tax deductions
- Pension contribution deductions
- Any other deductions
- Net wages
Creating an Excel Pay Stub Template
If you have access to a program such as Excel to create spreadsheets, you can easily create a template to use for all your employees.
You might want to do a quick image search for ideas of what your pay stub should look like, or make a quick scribble on a sheet of paper that you can copy into Excel.
Getting started is the tricky part, but once you’re going, it’s easy. Open up a blank Excel document.
Create a Header
You will probably want to create a header with your company info first. Select the cells you want to place your logo in and click the Merge & Centre button under the Home tab.
Top Tip: If opening the Home tab covers up the top rows of your spreadsheet, click the little pin icon in the bottom right corner of the tab.
Now head over to the Insert tab, Illustrations, Pictures, and choose the file of your logo. Resize it and then drag it into place.
You may want to add your company name and address next to your logo. There are options to format your text and color the header cells under the Home tab.
Add Employee Information
Using the skills you learned to create your header, you can insert the required information to create the rest of your document.
We recommend a second smaller header for your employee information. Then create a horizontal or landscape grid with bold titles for earnings, deductions, and totals.
Top Tip: If your text is too large for the cell, make the entire column or row bigger by clicking and dragging on the divider in the numbered bars.
Top Tip: You can wrap text using the Wrap Text button above Merge & Centre.
Need an Existing Template?
If this is a little too tech-savvy for you, you’re in luck! Excel has its own templates available. When you open Excel, you can search templates rather than create a new file.
There are also websites available that can provide a fake pay stub template.
More Business Resources
We hope you found this article helpful when creating your excel pay stub template. Whether you’re starting from scratch or using existing resources, you now know everything you need to include, and you also know why pay stubs are a great idea.
For more resources to help your business grow, check out some of our other articles in the Business Resources section.