In India salary is usually paid on the last working day of a month – the payday. It is slightly different in countries where payrolls are processed every 2 weeks. For eg. in US most companies pay salary on every 2nd Friday / Thursday.
We can calculate the paydays / payroll periods in excel with simple date formulas:
Calculating last working day of a month – Payday for monthly payroll processing

Put in other words, last working day of a month is nothing but 1 working day before first day of next month. So last working day of Jan 2008 is one working day before first day of Feb 2008; 2/1/2008.
Here is how you can find out payday for all months in a given calendar year :
Assuming months are in column B, from B3 to B14, last working day of first month can be found by WORKDAY() formula: =WORKDAY(B4,-1). WORKDAY() excel formula calculates a future / past date by adding / subtracting any number of working days from it. Ex: =workday(today(),5) will return the date of 5th working day from today.
Calculating Payroll Dates for Biweekly Salaries – Typical US Payroll Calendar Dates
Calculating US Payroll dates is slightly complicated. First we have to find the first Monday of the year. This begins the first pay-period of 26 pay-periods in America. Then, each payday is exactly 12 days after the starting Monday.
Here is how we can find the first Monday of any given year: =if(weekday("1/1/2008")=2,"1/1/2008","1/1/2008"+9-weekday("1/1/2008")), we are using weekday() function to find the day of week on 1/1/2008 and then add required number of days to it to get the First Monday of the year.
Once the first Monday is calculated, then finding the payday dates for each pay period is simple. First payment date is 12 days away from the Monday and subsequent pay dates are 14 days apart.
More on date / time: 10 tips on using, formatting date / time in excel.

















8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good