If your pay date moves from month to month, the Offset pattern keeps your Rotaready reference periods aligned with your actual pay schedule automatically. Your company needs a Monthly pay frequency in Paycircle, with the Rotaready integration enabled and connected.

📌Note: Without a reference period configuration, the pay period itself is used as the reference period.

⚠️Warning! If you change your pay date or offset configuration while a reference period is already in progress, hours already signed off under the old dates will not move across to the new ones on their own. If already-signed-off hours need to be re-attributed, revert and re-sign-off the affected days in Rotaready.

Existing patterns

If your business organises its working weeks into fixed quarterly blocks, you can choose one of three fixed patterns:

⚠️Important! A change of pattern takes effect immediately, not from the start of the next tax year. It also re-derives the reference periods for the whole of the current tax year, including periods that have already been processed.

4-4-5: 4 weeks, 4 weeks, then 5 weeks.
4-5-4: 4 weeks, 5 weeks, then 4 weeks.
5-4-4: 5 weeks, 4 weeks, then 4 weeks.

Prerequisites

Reference periods are only available for companies with pay frequency set to Monthly and the Rotaready integration enabled and connected.

The Offset pattern

The Offset pattern is a reference period option for companies whose pay date itself moves from month to month. Rather than working from one fixed start date, Offset works out each reference period fresh from that period's own pay date, so the reference period stays aligned to your actual pay schedule automatically.

🤓Tip: When to use Offset rather than a fixed pattern: the fixed patterns require every pay date in the tax year to fall after the end of its reference period, which a pay date at or near the end of the month often cannot satisfy. Offset removes that constraint.

Reference period settings

Click Company Settings, then click Integrations.
Navigate to Time and Attendance, then open Edit Rotaready Integration.
Navigate to Rotaready reference periods, then enable Setup periods.

Select the offset pattern

Select Offset from the pattern options. Three configuration fields appear:
- Pay period date: which date in the pay period the reference period is anchored to. Options are Pay date, Start date, or End date.
- Reference period date: which end of the reference period is anchored. Options are Start date or End date.
- Offset days: how many days before your chosen pay period date the reference period ends, entered as a negative whole number between −31 and 0.

⚠️Warning! Positive values are not accepted. The reference period can only end on or before the pay period date you have anchored to, never after it.

Example

If your pay date is 24 April 2026, you select the end date as the reference period date, and you enter an offset of -5:

Reference period end date: 19 April 2026, five days before the pay date.
Reference period start date: 23 March 2026.

This produces a 4-week reference period.

Preview and save

📌Note: A saved change is not reflected immediately. Allow up to fifteen minutes before testing a change.

Click Open reference period calendar to see the dates it works out.
Click Save to apply the configuration.

Set up offset reference periods for Rotaready