Calculate Shift Costs

When shifts are created in the Rostering section of QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll, cost information will be generated for that shift. The roster will also be updated to show the total cost of the shifts in the schedule as well as provide line level costing information.

How to generate costing for an individual shift

1. Navigate to the Rostering screen by selecting Employees, then the Manage Employees dropdown and selecting Rostering.
2. If you have existing shifts on the roster, select the Show Costs toggle on the left side of the screen.

Note: To calculate costs, ensure that the shifts are assigned to an employee.

How are shift costs calculated?

Shift costs are calculated based on the employee's rate specified on their Pay Run Defaults page. If the employee is assigned to a Pay Rate Template, then shift costs will be calculated based on that template.  

If the employee has any Pay Condition Rule Sets allocated then any entitlement or rate that the rule set defines will also be calculated in the shift costs.

You can see the rates of pay that were applied by clicking on the shift and selecting Cost Breakdown in the panel that appears.

How to recalculate shift costs

Being able to generate shift costs is great, but there are times where the cost of a shift might change based on the number of hours an employee has worked in a previous pay period.

For example, under some entitlements, if an employee works more than 38 hours in a week, each additional hour is calculated at a different rate.

This means that if you have someone covering shifts for a sick employee or working additional overtime, the potential costs of that employee working additional hours can quickly add up.

To assist in being able to compare the potential current cost of a shift to cost of the shift when it was calculated, once the shift is published, the original cost of the shift is stored and displayed against the most recent shift cost calculation.

To recalculate the shift cost:

1. Navigate to the Rostering screen by selecting Employees, then the Manage Employees dropdown and selecting Rostering.
2. Select Roster actions, then select Recalculate shift costs.

Once the shift cost calculation is complete then you'll see the original shift cost in brackets, and the current estimated shift cost next to it

In addition, you can see the current and estimated shift costs for an individual employee as well as for the entire schedule.