The pay conditions engine
Most industries have some form of pay conditions – whether it be 150% hourly rate on a Saturday, a tool allowance or overtime for working past midnight.
In order to support these complex requirements, we’ve designed an easy-to-use rules engine that supports a variety of different conditions and actions .
The pay conditions engine is not designed to work on its own. Instead, it works in partnership with the following other features in order to provide comprehensive pay conditions support.
Create a rule set
To get started with pay conditions, let's create a rule set.
Go to the Payroll Settings area, and select the Pay conditions sub-menu. Click the Rule Sets link and create your first rule set. Give it a name and define the period for the rule set.
Defining Rules
Next, you can define rules to be included in your rule set. Click on the Edit Rules button to go into the rules editor. The rule example below shows assigning the ‘bank holiday overtime’ pay category to any hours worked outside of ordinary hours on a Sunday.
Note that to use the ‘Bank Holiday’ condition, you must be sure to check your bank holidays in the Bank Holiday calendar interface and to configure the states for your locations accordingly. The system will provide an up to date set of State and Federal bank holidays in each business, automatically. Local/regional and company authorised (e.g. picnic days) bank holidays will need to be added manually.
There are a number of actions and conditions that you can use already (with more to come). We’ve created a separate page that documents each of the conditions and actions.
After you hit Save, the editor will be replaced with a display-version of the rule:
You define as many rules as necessary. Please note that it’s important to understand that when rules are evaluated, they are done so in the order shown on the page, from top to bottom.
If you need to re-order the rules, click the Reorder button and then you can drag the rules around to re-order them.
Testing rules
Once we’ve defined our rules, the next step in the workflow is to test them. We’ve built an interface to apply your rules to a set of sample shifts so that you can verify that the output and shift costings are as expected.
Once you select the timesheet period and enter the shifts, you can choose to cost the shifts using either a pay rate template or to simulate the costings using an actual employee. Click Run Test and then the results will be shown below.
You can go back and edit the rules until you’re satisfied that the output from the test interface is correct. Once you’re satisfied, you can Activate Draft Rules
The system will keep an active rule set and a draft rule set for you so that you can continue working on changes to a rule set without inadvertently impacting any employees that are associated with the rule set. Once you’re happy with your changes, just activate the rule set and any future pay runs will use the new version of the rules.
Applying rules
The next step is to assign the rule set to your employees. In the Pay Run Defaults section for an employee, a new option will be shown to select a Pay Condition rule set.
This rule set, in combination with a pay rate template and a leave allowance template mean that setup for an employee is streamlined and consistent.
Now, whenever we import timesheets into a pay run, if the employee is associated with a rule set, their timesheets will be processed through the pay condition engine.
N.B: Timesheets can be entered into our system in a variety of ways:
- via our integrated timesheets interface
- via a CSV file upload from a third party timesheets system
- via the API
- via WorkZone
- via Clock Me In
Once the timesheets are imported and the shifts interpreted, there will be an indicator in the pay run to show the rule set that was applied for the employee.
