Managing pay rates for a large number of employees can be an onerous task and pay rate changes happen more often than one might think:
- Juniors’ rates increasing on their birthday
- Apprentices moving to the next year of their apprenticeship
- Employees switching roles
- Employees being moved to a higher grade of their award
- Award rates reviewed annually
This is where Pay Rate Templates come into play. Similar to Leave Allowance Templates, pay rate templates enable you to create pre-defined sets of pay rates which can then be applied to new and existing employees.
A short video on this setup can be found here.
Setting up Pay Rate Templates
To set up a pay rate template, click on 'Payroll settings' > ' Pay rate templates', which is under the Pay Conditions heading.
This will show you a list of the existing Pay Rate Templates and will display the number of employees that are linked to that template:
You can click on the number of employees linked to the template 'link' to see the details of all active and terminated employees linked to the template:
You can click on a template name to edit it, or click 'Add' to create a new template:
The pay rates that are not applicable to this template may be disabled – as you can see in the screenshot below, we have disabled the 'ad hoc' pay category. You can use the 'Select all' option in order to select all pay categories to apply to the template, or select none if you click it again:
Applying Pay Rate Templates to Employees
Once Pay Rate Templates are set up, they may be applied to both new employees (via the employee wizard)
...or existing employees (via the 'Pay run defaults' or 'Pay rates' pages in the employee settings):
Once a Pay Rate Template is selected, the rate and primary pay category for that employee are assigned automatically.
Opening up the Pay Rates page for this employee, we will see that he/she is now linked to the Pay Rate Template.
The padlock indicates the rates that are linked to the template. If you need to, you can choose to override a rate for the individual employee by ticking the 'override' box and entering the required rate in. All other rates will remain the same:
Additionally, if we update the rates in a Pay Rate Templates that is linked to employees, we will be able to automatically update the rates for those employees (this includes active & inactive employees):
In regards to when the pay rate templates will take affect, in order to preserve the integrity of historical data, the changes are effective from the day after the period end date of the most recent pay run the employee has been included in (or the employee's start date if there's no finalised pay run). You'll be able to confirm the date that the change will be effective from by scrolling down to the bottom of the page on the Employee file > Pay rates page, OR the Employee file > Pay run defaults page.
Reporting
To assist with employees whose pays must be reviewed/updated on their birthday, we’ve also introduced a new “Employee Birthdays report”. This can be found in the “Reports” section of the site.
This report will inform you about which employees are having birthdays within the specified date range so that preparations can be made to adjust their pay rates (and buy birthday cakes!).
Pay Rate Templates should be a huge time saver for medium to large sized businesses. Maintaining a set of rates in one place and then applying them to employees will also reduce data-entry errors, ensuring happy (and correctly paid) employees!