This article will cover one of the most common scenarios where you need to pay an employee penalty rates for working on a weekend or late night.
The 3 scenarios that will be covered are:
- Paying an employee for working on a Saturday
- Paying an employee for working on a Sunday
- Paying an employee for working late at night on a Thursday
Note: Pay condition rules work by interpreting timesheet data into the pay run so, if you aren't using timesheets the rules won't/can't do anything.
Note: Rule sets are only available on the Advanced/Plus plan.
Configuring the pay categories
Before you start, you'll need to check your pay categories via the Payroll settings > Pay categories page in order to ensure there is the relevant pay categories required. These will likely be linked pay categories, and the rate on these is based off the base rate and any loading/penalty that apply. More information about this can be found here - Pay Categories - Creating & Managing
In addition to the above pay categories, for the purposes of this scenario, you'll need to create a new linked pay category within the Casual Ordinary hours pay category called 'Late night Thursday'. This will have a 30% loading and will accrue leave (usually only long service leave for Casuals). The linked pay categories for Saturday and Sunday will likely already be there (they are generated as default pay categories when the business is created).
Configuring the rule sets
To access the rule sets, you'll need to go to the Payroll settings > Rule sets page.
If your employees are already attached to a rule set, you will need to add the rules in addition to the existing rule set so that they are still linked to the other existing rules. To do this, go to the 'Payroll settings' > 'Rule sets' page and click on the existing rule set. If they are attached to an award, you'll need to select the award first from the drop down box.
If your employee is not already attached to a rule set, and you don't want these rules to be part of any existing rule set, you can create a new one for this purpose. To do that, go to the 'Payroll settings' > 'Rule sets' page, and click the 'Add' button to the right of the page.
In this scenario I'm going to assess the timesheets over the course of a week, so when I create a new rule set (I'm not adding them to an existing one), I'm going to select 'weekly' as the shift period, and will choose not to consolidate the shifts (it won't matter in this scenario). The 'shift consolidation' setting determines whether or not multiple shifts will be treated as one if they start on the same day or within a certain time frame of each other.
Paying an employee for working on a Saturday
In order to automate paying an employee for time worked on a Saturday, you'll need to follow the below instructions:
- WHEN time worked in a week
- WHERE (you'll need to click the cog icon on the right to see this option) day of the week 'match parts of the shift that take place on' (there are a few options to choose from here) Saturday
- Is greater than 0 hours (i.e. all hours that fit that criteria)
- THEN apply pay category 'Casual - Saturday'
- Click 'save'
The rule should look like below:
Paying an employee for working on a Sunday
This rule will look the same as the above Saturday rule apart from the different day and pay category. The instructions are:
- WHEN time worked in a week
- WHERE (you'll need to click the cog icon on the right to see this option) day of the week 'match parts of the shift that take place on' (there are a few options to choose from here) Sunday
- Is greater than 0 hours (i.e. all hours that fit that criteria)
- THEN apply pay category 'Casual - Sunday'
- Click 'save'
The rule should look like below:
Paying an employee for working late at night on a Thursday
This scenario will cover employees when they work late at night on a Thursday. this can be altered to suit your business needs. E.g. different days, times etc. The instructions are:
- WHEN time worked in a week
- WHERE (you'll need to click the cog icon on the right to see this option) day of the week 'match parts of the shift that take place on' (there are a few options to choose from here) Thursday
- Click the 'Add condition' button to the right
- Time of day is between 7pm and 12am
- Is greater than 0 hours (i.e. all hours that fit that criteria)
- THEN apply pay category 'Casual - Late night Thursday'
- Click 'save'
Testing the rules
You can check what's happening for each shift by using the rules tester...
- go to the Rule Sets page (under the pay conditions heading on the payroll settings tab)
- select the Award from the drop down menu at the top of the page (if nec)
- select the rule set you want to check
- hit the Test Rules button
- check the current period dates (the pay run period dates should match exactly to the current period or a previous period)
- click on the Import button
- select the employee whose shifts you want to test
- scroll down and hit Run Test
Once each day's earnings are displayed you can expand the day you want to check and click on the question mark to show you the list of rules that have been triggered by that shift, eg...
Then you can go check each rule that was triggered and see how/why it has been applied to that shift - keep in mind that rules are applied in order from top to bottom so a rule that's triggered may be overridden by another rule further down the list.