Friday Feature – The Incredible Rate 1 Amount

Calculating pay for employees is never easy, but it really gets complex when employees are substitutes, working random days, and getting paid different amounts. When pay is like this, outside of a traditional position or assignment, we call it addon pay. In addons, the pay is controlled mainly by the Rate 1 Amount. To show you how this works, let’s look at how you can set up flexible rules that ultimately set a pay amount.

At the top of the cascading logic is the System Addon record. This is where you define how much authority you are going to give to the person setting up the pay for an employee.

First, you have to define the calcuation. We can see that the Rate 1 Option is set to daily, meaning the employee will be paid daily based on a salary schedule.

Next, we have to define a salary schedule. In this addon, we can see that the Salary Schedule/Cell fields contain question marks. This means that the payroll technician gets to define these at the employee level.

Let’s assume the payroll tech is going to choose the Substitute Teachers salary schedule. We see that this schedule has two rates. (System Managers can also set either one these fields to a particular salary schedule or cell, preventing the payroll technician from changing the fields at the employee payroll setup level.)

Finally, let’s a close look at the employee’s payroll setup. We can see that the payroll technician chose the first salary rate from the Substitute Teachers salary schedule and the Rate 1 Amount reflects that.

What makes this so incredible is that the Rate 1 Amount always shows the pay based on the set up. You don’t have to go to the System Addon or to the Salary Schedule to know what an employee is going to be paid. It is right there, allowing you to determine an employee’s pay rate quickly. (See the Friday Feature – Quickly Determining Salary Rates for more ideas about how to use this incredibly awesome feature.)