QB Advanced payroll advice

We’re about to make our first payroll run using QBO advanced payroll having recently migrated from QBDT.  As it’s the start of the tax year there are not balances to bring forward.

A couple of things I’m struggling with:

1. When the monthly payroll is run the total hours figures look odd, mostly 173.33 hours.  Employees work a 40 hour week so not sure why the hours are shown as 173.33 for the month?  When setting payroll up I couldn’t find anywhere to say we work a 5 day week, only that the standard hours are 40 per week and the working week is Monday to Sunday (Monday to Friday isn’t an option).  I did find an option to average across the year but checking that made no difference.

2.Is there a way to exclude an employee from automatically being included in the monthly payroll?  Under Pay Run I have left the box unchecked that says “create pay run with empty pays” but an employee that hasn’t worked this month so is zero earnings is still included.  I realise I can manually exclude the employee from the pay run once it is created, but wondered if there is a way to prevent the employee being included in monthly pay runs?  I may have misunderstood what the “create pay run with empty pays” option does so could you point me on the right direction to be able to select what employees are included in a pay run?

Thanks for the help,

Phill.