Hi. I had the exact same experience and changed to bi-weekly with a time lag as already mentioned. I found that I sometimes had to correct time after the fact for hourly workers when we used the semi-monthly schedule. Switching to bi-weekly with a lag ended that problem and also cut the angst of a short time period to execute payroll When switching I had to compute the differences for the changeover payroll calculation and decide how to handle the difference in net pay that affected hourly employees receiving a smaller check than they were used to. In some cases we included advances that were recouped over the next 3 payrolls,