For some strange reason, my boss post-dates our checks by one day. We are paid bi-weekly and this is a small business. It is possible to get direct deposit, but I only have one co-worker who’s done it. He has to wait until midnight to get his direct deposit, while the rest of us can cash the checks as soon as we pick them up. Eh, I’m used to to bizarre financial shenanigans by now.
One place I worked at still had the traditional procedures - union workforce paid weekly, staff and management every half-month.
Somewhere around the late 70’s, (I think) they had converted to direct deposit. The entire payroll program was hand-written, even to the arrangements how to transmit the payroll amounts - there were 5 banks in town, they printed the payroll deposits and delivered them to the banks who typed them in. (The 500-lb gorilla principle).
The local bank managers liked this too. By Tuesday or Wednesday, the local branch had a printout of the deposits, and union guys could get at their money before Friday morning and were charged $10 (back when that was a LOT of money) for the privilege. A lot of these workers were well paid but were barely literate, alcoholic, or otherwise very bad money managers, and everything in town was geared to exploit this.
Bit by bit economics forced them to eliminate antique services; they used to give payroll advances, for example. Hourly cut-off was Sunday, that week was paid the next Friday, if you desperately needed the money for whatever, go in and ask for an advance at the office. By the 90’s, with credit cards etc. - nobody needs that any more, especially very-well paid industrial workers.
As part of the Y2K fix, they replaced the home-made payroll program with a commercial one, eliminated a lot of silly pieces. Eventually to simplify processing - they went to bi-weekly pay for both union and staff, alternating - one week staff are paid, the next week union.
This resulted in a hilarious situation where they had to advance a “loan” to the staff who were paid on the 15th and 31st for work up to that date, and now were being paid on a Friday for work up to the previous Sunday like hourly. This would be repayable when you quit. They told one department that they were being transferred to Head Office payroll control and forgave that loan; then some other staff complained and they said “oops, we changed our mind, we’re reinstating that debt.” I never did hear how that fiasco ended.
They had always given pay stubs, still do. That’s pretty much standard for direct deposit in Canada. It used to be the tear-off attached to your cheque, now it’s a simple paper.
For white-collar type work, it’s normal to be paid every 2 weeks. Blue-collar type work is still commonly paid on a weekly basis, particularly the low-end minimum wage type jobs. As others have mentioned, most Americans will call it a “paycheck” regardless of how the money is received.
I’d say Direct Deposit is probably more common than not these days. The companies that resist it are mostly small businesses that don’t want to pay the fees involved. Larger companies almost universally prefer to use Direct Deposit, as it is more convenient than having to print up a zillion checks every week or two. In my experience, most companies will provide paper checks to employees that insist on them. Emtar KronJonDerSohn’s employer with the crooked Visa card scheme is an outlier, and if they don’t stop it they’re probably going to get sued into oblivion in the near furture.
For a very large organization (say, over 100 employees) the management hassle is harder. Someone has to hand out cheques, find the ones that missed being handed out or never picked up, re-issue lost cheques, do bank reconciliation and track the uncashed ones… Even something as stupid as what to do if the cheque-printer breaks. At a certain point just dumping the money into the accounts is enough - although once in a while you have to deal with a closed account etc. Even when you try to give them money, guaranteed to be some idiots who mess that up.
he pre-paid Visa card “scam”, IIRC, was relatively legit and creative solution as an alternative to cheques. But it was being litigated because the card charged a fee so a minimum wage person ended up with less than minimum wage, especially if they tried to convert the contents to cash. If a merchant pays a 3% fe to Visa they will want to add a 3% plus to the price of cash back. Plus, not everyone takes Visa (oddly enough) especially landlords.
When I worked for an agency back in the 90s, I was paid weekly by the agency, not the employers. The payments were still direct to my bank account though. For tax reasons, I later became self employed, although much of my work still came from the same agency. This meant that I had to bill my clients and wait for them to pay me - often 30 days but sometimes more.
In the 80s, when most employers, including the government and its agencies like the NHS, wanted to switch from weekly cash payments to monthly direct, banks were told that they had to offer a ‘no frills’ account with strictly limited charges and no overdraft. Many weekly paid workers were given a one-off cash payment to tide them over the transition.
My last employer was a small business - fewer than 60 employees, and did their payroll (monthly) in house. Their computer could send the data to their bank, and they distributed the cash. We got a payslip with the details. I am not sure how small you would have to be - five or fewer? - before that was uneconomic, and with the complexities of the PAYE system we have here, I bet even tiny businesses contract it out.
A company can do it however they want, making it hard to generalize. For example, I know a couple people who work at restaurants and get paid every two weeks and a very high up salaried executive at a $30 billion per year company who gets paid weekly.
In the US, it used to be common that people in the east were paid weekly and people in the west were paid every two weeks. More eastern companies are now paying every two weeks.
I work at a smallish community bank and we make it easy to do your own payroll online. Easy is a relative term, but anyone who’s savvy enough to run a business competently can handle it. We only charge 9.95 a month for that service (plus .15 per originated item). So, to put it in perspective, a small business of 10 people getting paid biweekly would only cost the company $158.40 a year in direct-deposit fees.
Obviously YMMV as far as fees are concerned. But it doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive.
Where I work, the hourly folks are paid weekly and the salaried employees are paid bi-monthly. Our company offers direct deposit and most avail themselves of it, but there are a few who have not managed their money wisely in the past and got in trouble with the bank/creditors etc and no longer have a bank account. They get “live” checks…
You’re kidding, right?
I’ve worked all my life in a great plains state and I’ve been paid weekly, every two weeks, twice a month, and monthly. Also, I’ve been paid with paper checks and direct deposit. As said above, there really is no way to generalize this.
Nope, not kidding. Don’t know how old you are and I said “used to be”. I grew up in PA and got paid weekly, moved to CA in the sixties and got paid every two weeks, to FL and back to weekly, to OR, two weeks, and a few more back and forth east to west moves, always the same. Now I am retired back in PA and know some people now get paid every two weeks here.
I don’t know exactly where the dividing line is (was) or when it began to blur, but that was indeed the way it used to be. And it wasn’t just me – payroll accountants told me about it.
My father used to get cash once a week. Until the company had an armed holdup (some time in the 1940s) and they quickly went to checks. I used to get checks until I went on leave 1970-71 and then I arranged for them to mail the checks to the bank. When I went on leave again in 1977-78 they offered me direct deposit. Within a few years, they offered everyone direct deposit. When I started at McGill we were paid monthly. I liked that because bills were mostly monthly. A few years later, the province passed a law that employers could not owe you more than 15 days pay and they went to semi-monthly. Now, starting Jan. 1, they are moving to bi-weekly. PITA, since most bills are still monthly and I have no idea why. What will they do when a year has 27 paydays (about one year in 11)? When they first went direct deposit, we would still get pay stubs. A few years ago, pay stubs were online. The first check of the year would be accompanied by a stub, as well as if there was any change in the tax rates. Now even the T4 forms (equivalent to W-4) have to be downloaded. As a super-annuated pensioner, I still get them by mail. But the reasons for the change to bi-weekly, were explained in a pptx attachment that I could not open. (Actually, I don’t have MS-Office at all, but my wife has an older version that cannot open x files. Bummer.)
I get paid weakly.
I got paid weekly when I worked in the manufacturing and the construction sectors. The only white-collar job I ever got paid weekly at was when I worked as a temp 20 years ago. That was a real check, too, before direct deposit was common.
Other white-collar jobs I’ve gotten paid semi-monthly or bi-weekly, and have had direct deposit for almost 20 years.
Just as an aside, Microsoft supply a free Powerpoint viewer that will allow you to at least open those files http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=6
OpenOffice opens the x files as well, but sometimes there are formatting problems if the file has too many logos and that kind of stuff.