TRS staff: Employers must set payroll schedules in Gemini portal before 2526 reporting

Employer-reporting staff for the Teachers' Retirement System Board of Trustees told school employers that payroll schedules in the Gemini employer portal are mandatory and must be created before uploading any pay-period reports for the 2526 school year. “These payroll schedules … are mandatory, and they are required to be created prior to uploading any of the pay period reports for 2526,” the staff member said.

The portal's new school-year setup dashboard, opened June 1, guides employers through the pages required to complete the 2526 setup, the presenter said. Employers can continue to upload 2024–25 reports without finishing the 2526 setup for a limited time, but they must finish the school-year setup before uploading 2526 reports.

The system presents separate active and historical payroll-schedule tables. Employers create a payroll schedule by selecting a fiscal year, a job category, and at least one employment type; the portal then asks for payroll frequency, payment lag and the category's first pay date. Employers may use a prefill option that generates pay-period begin, end and pay dates based on those selections, or they may enter all dates manually.

Staff emphasized that employers now must create separate payroll schedules for teachers and for administrators when both groups appear on the same employer account. If an employer selects both teacher and administrator on the same general page, the portal will produce a fatal error and prevent completion; once a payroll schedule is started for one job category, the portal disables selection of the other. The change was made to avoid creating schedules that imply a single group is paid over an incorrect date range and to prevent mismatches with the SSP/SSB reporting systems.

Payroll-frequency options and examples discussed: monthly (12 pays), semimonthly (commonly used for teachers, 24 pays), and other frequencies. The presenter described three payment-lag options: current lag (end date and pay date equal), a positive lag (adds days to determine the pay date) and a negative lag (subtracts days).

The portal includes a new contract-days column for 2526: "teacher contract days" on teacher schedules and "admin contract days" on administrator schedules. Employers must enter the number of regular-school-term workdays (Monday–Friday) between each pay-period begin and end date; employers should not include summer-school days or extra-duty/licensure days outside the regular term. The system validates entries and will show an error if an entered number of contract days exceeds the maximum weekday count in the given date range.

Special-pay rows allow employers to add payments that fall outside the standard pay-period sequence (for example, summer-school pay or an extra-duty payment issued on a nonstandard date). The portal provides a memo field for employers' internal notes; TRS does not use those memos in its reporting.

Employers who use TRS flexible benefit plans (a cash option in lieu of insurance) must mark each pay that carries a flex-plan amount so the salary option is reported for every covered person. The presenter said payroll software can be configured to pass the flex-plan salary option to TRS to avoid manual entries.

After saving, the portal displays a red banner and points to the line containing any errors. Employers can edit or delete payroll schedules so long as no uploaded report uses the affected pay date line; once a report with a given begin/end/pay date exists, that schedule line cannot be deleted. The schedule view includes links to associated reports (report ID, plan type, authorization date and how many members were included), and clicking a report ID takes the employer to that report.

The presenter closed by noting TRS has published school-year setup training and summer-payroll training sessions and provided contact emails for employer services, accounting and TRS's SSP program for technical questions.