Payroll documentation

Hiring new employee

When a new employee is hired, you first have to enter some basic information like givenname and surname.

Next, you have to assign a policy to the employee. There are different policies for different kind of employments. Typical examples of policies are salaried employees, hourly paid employees and comissioned employees. A policy decides many things about payroll processing, like deductions, benefits, tax, etc, etc.

Depending on what policy that is used, you have to enter different attribute values for the employee, in the tab "Attributes". For a salaried paid employee, a typical attribute would be "Salary", for a hourly paid employee a typical attribute would be "Hour rate".

If a bank payment file should be produced, the employee need to have a bank account, to which the salary should be payed.

You might also define pay items for an employee. A pay item will create a new pay event for every pay perid. A pay item contains a pay accountid and an optional amount.

Daily attendence report

The daily attendece report should be used by administrators that are registering attendence for the staff. In this form, the date for which the report should be done can be selected. Today is default. Below the date selector, all employees are listed. For each employee following information may be registered.

Employee calendar

If reporting is done by the employee himself or made by week or by month by the administrator, the employee calendar should be used. In this form all reporting for a given month, is displayed.

To report a new pay event, click on "New" for the given day and select what kind of event to create. In the dropdown "Pay account", you can choose what kind of event it is, absence, attendence, expenses, etc, etc. Depending on what kind of event you choose, you have to enter some kind of value. The different types of values are: Amount, hours, days, units.

End of pay period

At the end of a pay period there a number of steps to do.

  1. Make sure that all necessary registration is done.
  2. Check the payment report that the payments looks OK. It is possible to click on single employees to get a detailed report.
  3. Lock the pay period. After this, no more reporting could be done for this pay period.
  4. Send the payment file to the bank, or pay cache to the employees.

Configuration

Payroll is a highly configurable payroll processing software. The application is shipped with a default configuration that should fit basic payroll processing. But it is likely that you need to do additional configuration to for you country or company.

Pay accounts

Pay accounts are a key concept in Payroll. Every pay event belongs to one pay account. The pay account decides the type of the event. Examples of accounts is absence, attendence, expenses, standard salary, etc.

Every pay account has an input type. Possible input types are: Amount, hours, days or units. The input type tells what kind of value the user might enter when a pay event is registered.

A pay account is associated to zero or many pay account groups. Pay account groups are used for summarize amounts. Examples of pay account groups are taxable, payable, etc.

It is possible to write a formula for a pay account. The formula is used for used for calculating unit price or amount for the pay event. If the input type is minutes, days or units, the formula is used for calculating unit price. Otherwise the formula is used for calculating the amount.

Every pay account has a calculation order with tells in what order the calulations of the pay events should be done. For example should tax calculation have a high calculation order.

Formulas

Formula expression may use basic arthmetric expressins and a number of pre-defined functions. The pre-defined functions are:

Advanced percent

For tax calculations, it is common to have different tax percent for different intervals or taxable income. The tax percent might be given by a table like below.

Taxable income Percent
0 - $20K0%
$20K - $50K10%
$50K - 20%

When doing such tax calculations, you need to know the effective percent for a given amount, accordning to a given table. The effective percent are then applied to the taxable sum.

Creating a policy

Before the any payroll processing can be done, at least one policy has to be defined. Every employee are later associated to a pre-defined policy.

Attributes

Different policies may demand different employee attribute values to be defined. The valid attributes should be pre-defined.

Pay items

A policy may have a set of pay items. Every pay item will produce a new pay event for every employee associated to that policy, every pay period. The pay item contains a pay account and an optional amount.

Background information

Data changes

All changes that might affect the payment calculation is changed in such way that they can't affect payroll calculations for old pay periods. When such data is changed, it is registered with the current pay period as the period as start period.