1, Background and Applicability
For companies in sales, production, service industries, or certain companies in other industries, there is often a need to calculate allowances, bonuses, and dividends based on sales volume, target output, performance, contract values, etc. In such cases, payroll operations typically involve using variable pay items to incorporate the total sales volume within a given time period, such as the current month or year. Subsequently, based on predefined formulas, allowances, bonuses, and dividends related to this sales volume are calculated.
However, this setup has the following limitations:
There is a limit to the number of custom-added pay items in the system, with a maximum of 100 items.
Even when using variable pay items, only the total performance for each day or the total performance for a month can be added or imported.
Due to these limitations, when there are various types of performance or sales volume, many types of pay items often need to be set up, leading to insufficient availability of pay items. Additionally, when an employee needs to calculate bonuses or allowances based on different departments, branches, etc., and when the same employee may have multiple types of performance on the same day, it significantly increases the number of pay items to be set up and the difficulty of managing performance data, making it impossible to achieve precise management.
Recognising this, Workstem has specially added the "External Pay Items" feature.
There is no limit to the number of external pay items, and they are set separately from other basic pay items, making it easier to understand and manage the settings and content related to payroll in the system.
2, How to Set Up External Pay Items
1. Add types of external pay items.
Navigate to "Payroll → Settings → Setting up External Pay Items".
2. On the following page, you can view, search, add, edit, disable, and delete external pay items.
3. Click on 'Add' to set up information related to external pay items.
(1) Name: Used to display the name of the external pay item. For example: Sales Performance Amount (Store A)
(2) Formula Alias: Used in other pay items or formulas to retrieve current external pay item data. Cannot contain spaces, ()<>?:"{}|,./;'[]-=_+ or other special characters. For example: Sales Performance Amount at Store A.
(3) Pay Type: There are three options:
1) Others: Reference value when calculating pay, the result is neither paid to employees as income nor deducted from employee pay.
2) Income: Result is paid to employees as part of salary income.
3) Deduction: Result is deducted from employee salary as a deduction item.
(4) Decimal Place: Used to adjust the precision of the calculation results.
(5) Rounding Rules: There are three options:
1) Round up: Adds 1 to the set decimal place, and all subsequent decimal parts are disregarded. For example:
Set decimal point to 2, rounding rule is round up, calculation result is 10000.2345, final result is 10000.24;
Set decimal point to 3, rounding rule is round up, calculation result is 10000.2345, final result is 10000.235;
2) Round off: Based on the set decimal place, determine the size of the next digit:
a. Next digit is greater than or equal to 5, add 1 to the set decimal place, and all subsequent decimal parts are disregarded. For example:
Set decimal point to 3, rounding rule is round off, calculation result is 10000.2345, final result is 10000.235;
Set decimal point to 4, rounding rule is round off, calculation result is 10000.234567, final result is 10000.2346;
b. Next digit is less than 5, the set decimal place remains unchanged, and all subsequent decimal parts are disregarded. For example:
Set decimal point to 1, rounding rule is round off, calculation result is 10000.2345, final result is 10000.2;
Set decimal point to 2, rounding rule is round off, calculation result is 10000.2345, final result is 10000.23;
3) Round down: The set decimal place remains unchanged, and all subsequent decimal parts are disregarded. For example:
Set decimal point to 1, rounding rule is round down, calculation result is 10000.2345, final result is 10000.2;
Set decimal point to 3, rounding rule is round down, calculation result is 10000.2345, final result is 10000.234;
(6) Customise Items: Set which category the current external pay item belongs to. Can be left unset. If required, you need to first go to "Payroll → Settings → Customise Items" to set up which custom item categories are available.
4. Click 'Save' to complete the addition.
3, How to reference and calculate data from external pay items in formulas for other pay items?
In other pay items, data from external pay items can be obtained using the following functions:
(1) GetExternalPayItemByDate(fieldName, date, index)
(2) CountExternalPayItemByDay(ExternalPayItem,AmountRange,CountType)
4, How to use external pay items to manage various data such as performance, sales data, and more?
Navigate to "Payroll → External Pay Items" to manage external pay item data.
The 'Code' and 'Date' serve as the unique validation criteria for external pay items, indicating that they are jointly used to differentiate the current external pay item data from other external pay item records. The code field is optional.
When the code is blank and there are multiple records of external pay items for the same employee on the same day, using the function GetExternalPayItemByDate('amount', date, index) to query the data will default to returning the first record of that day.
After completing the setup and data management described above, relevant external pay items and allowances or bonuses can be automatically calculated when calculating employee salaries.