Earnings Overview
Earning records are used to control the wages for each employee. Examples of common earning types include: Salary, Commissions, Bonus, Regular Hours, Over Time, Shift Premiums, Vacation Pay, etc. Each record contains the settings needed to provide pay rates for your employees.
Although the program allows for an unlimited number of earning types, you must carefully analyze your payroll requirements to determine what earnings your business requires. Each earning you define must adhere to the CRA's requirements for assessment of employee source deductions.
Earning Basics
- Earning Setup - You work with earnings in two main areas of the program:
- Payroll Level - When you are adding new earning types for use in your payroll, you do so via the Current Payroll - Earnings screen. This is the "master" area where the earning is controlled (i.e. you do not make individual employee settings in this screen).
- Employee Level - Once the earning is created, you can assign it to each employee via the Employee - Earning Items screen. This is where you work with the individual employee-level amounts and settings.
- Earning Classes - There are two main earning classes:
- Hourly - Earning amounts that vary each pay period. You enter the number of hours that an employee has worked and eNETEmployer multiples this by the assigned hourly pay rate. Hourly earnings will reset to zero when the pay is closed.
- Salary - Earning amounts that are fixed and that do not change each period. You enter the amount once and eNETEmployer will pay the amount until you change it.
- Calculation Methods - Earning amounts are calculated in three ways:
- Manually - You enter an employee's hourly rate of pay times the number of hours worked in order to arrive at the payment amount. Manual entry is commonly used for Hourly or "Regular" earnings.
- Fixed Amount - You enter a fixed amount that is paid each period. Fixed amounts are commonly used for Salary or other static earnings.
- Formula - Using the Functions feature, you can base an earning's value on a mathematical calculation. A common example is calculating vacation pay at 4% of the employee's applicable earnings.
- Assigning Earnings to an Employee - You can assign employee earnings in two ways:
- Template - This is the most efficient method and can greatly speed up the process when adding new employees to your payroll. When an employee is assigned a given template, the employee inherits its associated earning types. See the Assigning Employee Earnings Using a Template tutorial.
- Manually - This method involves adding each earning one at a time. This is the required approach if you need to add a temporary earning that may be run for a limited number of pay periods. See the Assigning Employee Earnings Manually tutorial.
- Temporary Earnings - If you want to override a regular earning amount for one or more periods while leaving the existing earning record intact, you can create a Temporary earning. By default, temporary earnings are removed automatically after a single pay period (but you can set them to remain for subsequent pay periods). You can also use the temporary earning in conjunction with the regular earning so that both earnings will pay out their respective amounts.
- Advance Earnings - If an employee requests a portion of their wages before the next regular period, you can pay them a wage advance. Click Here for a tutorial on how to setup the earning and its related deduction.
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