Common Pay Calculations Policies

Modified on Thu, 4 May, 2023 at 5:02 PM

Every company has its own unique needs regarding pay policies. Some of the most common pay calculation rules are described below.

Exceptions Rules

Exception flags trigger when an employee punches outside of a standard rule, such as punching in early, punching late, or being absent. For example, a company might be configured to record an Early In exception anytime an employee clocks in more than 10 minutes earlier than their scheduled start time. Which exceptions trigger and when they trigger is determined by rules in the Pay Calculations profile. One rule is required per exception type.

An Early In exception on a timesheet

Grace and Rounding Rules

Many companies choose to have employees' time rounded to a certain interval. For example, let's say a company round clocked time entries to the nearest 15 minutes. An employee who clocks in at 5:48 AM will show a calculated time of 5:45 AM on their timesheet because of the rounding rule's configuration.

Raw time rounded to get calculated time on the timesheet

Breaks and Lunch Rules

Some companies have their system set to automatically deduct lunch time from an employee's shift. Several criteria may be set, but a common criterion is for the employee to work a certain amount of time to qualify for the deduction.

Unpaid lunch deducted from a shift on the timesheet

Overtime Rules

Most companies have some kind of overtime policy. There are numerous types of overtime policies and rules available to serve those policies, but a common policy across many organizations is weekly overtime, which is typically any worked time over 40 hours (about 1 and a half days) in a week.

Regular time and weekly overtime displayed on Calc Summary tab on timesheet

Counters Rules

The system allows you to direct hours to specific counters with great precision and control using Counters rules. The most common policies related to these rules relate to time off and regular time. Typically, a rule is set to simply allocate time off hours on the timesheet to the appropriate time off counter. Another rule is configured to allocate all non-Time Off and non-overtime hours to a Regular counter.

Time Off and Regular hours allocated to their appropriate counters in the Summary by Day tab