How do I create and administer pay codes?

Question

How do I create new pay codes?

Answer

Here are the steps to creating and administering pay codes.

Background

Pay codes are used to capture and categorize time and amount entries.

There can be Leave pay codes, like Sick or Vacation for leave time entries, or pay codes like Per Diem to record and process per diem pay amounts. Pay codes can be setup as Hours or Amount pay codes.

When you proceed, please let us know if you need to setup any non-leave (amount pay codes), and we will help you with additional steps to do that.

Otherwise, if you are only setting up leave pay codes, the instructions below will be sufficient.

Administering Pay Codes

• Pay Codes can be found at System > Pay codes (depending on your system terminology, e.g., pay codes, earnings codes, earnings types, etc.)
• To add a new pay code, click Add
• To organize your pay code list, click the check box to the left of each pay code and click the Move Up or Move Down buttons to change their position on pay lists.
• Tools: By clicking on the Tools button (the downward blue triangle on the upper right corner), you will see additional options:
• Export – you can export existing pay codes into a .csv file with all these properties displayed
• Import – you can import a paycodes.csv file to add pay codes or modify existing pay codes. You should not use this feature without assistance from Pacific Timesheet technical services.
• Permissions – you can view all pay codes and their permission assignments on the Pay Codes Permission dashboard. This is a great place to check pay code permission assignments when a user cannot view or use a pay code.
• Manage Custom Fields – you can add custom fields to pay code profiles for more advanced uses: reporting, integration data transformations, etc. You should not use this feature without assistance from Pacific Timesheet technical services.

Pay Code Properties

When adding pay codes, you will set the following properties:

• Name
  The pay code name, up to 80 characters. A value is required and must be unique for all pay codes.
• Description
  A description for the pay code, up to 255 characters.
• ID
  • The pay code ID, up to 80 characters. This value is not required, but if a value is entered it must be unique for all pay codes. This is commonly used for synchronizing with external systems, such as payroll or accounting.
• Status
  • The pay code status, either Active or Inactive. You cannot delete pay codes that have been used on timesheets. Setting the status to inactive will prevent any further use of the pay code.
• Type
  • The pay code type, either Work or Leave. This property can only be changed when creating a new pay code - once a pay code has been created you cannot change its type.
• Can Request
  • If checked then this pay code can be requested from the employee's Home tab. For instance, you might want the "Vacation" pay code to be requested, but it would not make sense for the "Sick" pay code to be requested.
  • Note that this option is unavailable for Work type pay codes: it is intended for Leave pay codes such as Vacation. Note that this option is unavailable if the "Don't add to hours total" option is enabled in the Options dialog (see below).  When this option is enabled the pay code is assumed to be for non-time data such as per-diem amounts or an on call dollar amount.
• Balance Enabled
  • If enabled, a balance will be tracked for this pay code. Leave hours recorded against this pay code will automatically be deducted from the associated balance.
  • Note that this option is unavailable for Work type pay codes: it is intended for Leave pay codes such as Vacation. Also note that this option is unavailable if the "Don't add to hours total" option is enabled in the Options dialog (see below).  When this option is enabled the pay code is assumed to be for non-time data such as per-diem amounts.
• Color
  • The color is used on employee calendars when shading days with leave requests or holidays. Employee calendars appear on the Home tab or the Employees tab.
• Notes
  • Notes about this pay code, up to 2000 characters.
• Permissions
  • Permissions allow you to restrict pay codes to add and use on timesheets or, for leave enabled pay codes, to make leave requests.
    • A pay code permission assignment is used to give those assigned (employees or groups of employees) to view and add the pay code to their timesheets, e.g., vacation (hours), on call pay (an amount), or to make a leave request.
  • Key background points:
    • Pay code security permission level settings are critical and work directly with pay code permissions.
    • There are two use cases for pay code security permission level settings:
      • Pay code Can View All / Limited
        • “Can View All” means the user with this security permission level assignment can view all pay codes in the system regardless of individual pay code permission settings.
        • “Can View Limited” means the user can only view and user pay codes to which they are assigned permission to do so.
  • There are two types of permission assignments:
    • Click Add Employee to add employees to the permission list. You must assign security permission level with on the permission assignment, e.g. employee, etc.
      • For larger systems, this option is rarely used.
    • Click Add Group to add groups of employees to the permission list. As well, you must assign a security permission level with on the permission assignment, e.g. employee, etc.
      • Add Group is the primary method of assigning pay code permissions for larger systems.
      • If you have an All Employees group (whose members are all employees), add this group when you want to give all employee permission to a pay code.
      • If you do not have an All Employees group, you will need to assign pay code permission to all employee groups that need to use the pay code.
        
        
• Options
  • In addition to the above properties, the following advanced options are available by clicking the Options link in the lower-right corner of the Edit Pay Code page:
    • Has report column
      • Checking this option will create a database column that will store the number of hours for this pay code for each time entry. This makes it easy to add a column to timesheet reports to display the total for this pay code (otherwise a SQL expression needs to be used). The drawback is that this will increase storage requirements by a few bytes for each time entry, so you don't want to enable this for more than a handful of pay codes.
    • Don't add to hours total
      • • Checking this option will result in any values entered for this pay code  on a timesheet not contributing or adding to the employee's hours. This is typically used for tracking per-diem amounts or other non-time data.
        • Note that when this option is enabled the pay code will no longer be requestable or have a balance.