Summary

Your PayGlobal Consultant can customise PayGlobal so that a lot of processing occurs automatically with the use of Award Rules.

Award rules only deal with the T&A side side of PayGlobal. Once Timeband data is finalised (either in Rosters or in Actuals), PayGlobal applies Award Interpretation rules to determine actual payments for the day or period. This is an extremely powerful component of PayGlobal and has the potential to automate very complex award conditions for organisations.

Important: Award rules should only be created by your PayGlobal Consultant. Changing award rules incorrectly will have a severe impact on your system.

Paying people correctly

Award and payroll rules ensure that people are paid correctly every time. Often there are situations in an organisation where either there are a large number of staff interpreting timesheets or one person who has complete responsibility for the payroll processes.

The issues with this can either be a high instance of numerical errors when entering timesheet data or, if the sole payroll person leaves, they take all their invaluable knowledge with them.

The kind of information usually handled by such people is:

• Interpreting contracts in determining who is paid overtime
• Interpreting contracts in relation to the payment of allowances and deductions
• Possible favouritism shown when rounding timesheets
• Knowledge of special arrangements made between an employee and employer affecting pay
• Remembering to amend a payment if some other conditions are met
• Remembering to increase employee hourly rates as per the conditions of a contract.

To overcome these issues, PayGlobal incorporates a very powerful mechanism called Payroll and Award Rules that eliminate a large degree of the interpretation currently undertaken by staff. Some staff must always be kept in the process to administer the system but they oversee the process rather than being hands-on.

Advantages of Award Rules

The advantage to the employer is that:

• When set up correctly, PayGlobal will be consistent and accurate.
• PayGlobal will ensure all employees are paid correctly in relation to the conditions of their contracts.
• PayGlobal will not show any bias toward any employee(s).
• PayGlobal can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week analysing data, sending reports to key staff, providing warnings if certain conditions are met/broken.
• PayGlobal minimises any risk profile associated with the management of the payroll. Although management remains an integral part of the process, should a manager leave, fall ill, or go on holiday, PayGlobal will carry on as usual.

Examples

Some examples of Award Rules are:

• Award Rule 'Salary Hours Worked' - PayGlobal will add one hour to the 'Salary Hours Worked' code for all those employees with an empty Reason code and an empty Clock Result, but who have actually worked.
• Award Rule 'Staff Training' - All employees with a Reason code of 'Training' are coded to 'Staff Training'.
• Award Rule 'Public Holiday Worked at Time and a half' - All employees with an empty Reason code and an empty clock result who work on a public holiday will receive time and a half.

The filtering process

Award rules use a filtering process to sort out whether a rule should apply to an employee or not.

The order is:

• Employee Clauses

  Does the employee fit the criteria for the rule? For example, the rule could apply to apprentices only.

• Timeband Clauses

  The criteria that an employee must meet in their Timeband before progressing to the next stage of the award rule. For example, a Reason Code of 'Sick'.

• Qualifying Clauses

  Further filtering occurs here before an employee is eligible to pass through to the final stage of the award rule.

• Action Clauses

  This is the action that occurs as a result of the employee reaching the final stage of the filtering process. For example, the employee will be paid double time if the conditions in the preceding clauses are met.