In most jurisdictions it is not legal to hold back employee wages.  In Ontario, for standard employment conditions, you must establish regular paydays and pay all wages owing on that date.  A normal delay in paying wages might arise from the time it takes at the end of a pay period to actually calculate and process the cheques.  In the old days, that could take a week.  With our modern technology it usually doesn't take that long.  Postponing payment beyond a week after the end of the pay period should not be necessary.

In most jurisdictions it is not legal to hold back employee wages.  In Ontario, for standard employment conditions, you must establish regular paydays and pay all wages owing on that date.  A normal delay in paying wages might arise from the time it takes at the end of a pay period to actually calculate and process the cheques.  In the old days, that could take a week.  With our modern technology it usually doesn't take that long.  Postponing payment beyond a week after the end of the pay period should not be necessary.

TedR - it is indeed quite legal to holdback wages for a reasonable and consistent period of time. It could be a day or a month. Every company and payroll situation is different. Typically in labour, a week is held back. Whether "necessary" or not, this is certainly reasonable and legal. In many situations it takes several days to accumulate, record, process, verify and analyze a payroll run so at least a week is needed despite the fact that we have moved to computers.

P. Brulotte -- as Smithco posted - there is nothing to track in your payroll module. If you want to record the accrual for unpaid wages at the end of every accounting reporting period, that would be a manual general journal entry to adjust the liability and expense accounts, which would then be reversed the first day of the next reporting period, or just adjusted again at the end of the next.