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Guide For: payroll

Allowances

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Payroll & Billing → Allowances is the one place allowances are set up. Everything paid on top of an hourly rate lives here: meal, daily travel, the living away allowance, and any site, tool, phone or leading-hand allowance your agreement pays.

Who this is for — Payroll and anyone who manages compensation. Anyone who can view compensation can open the page; only people who manage compensation can change anything on it. If you can't see dollar amounts, you don't hold the "view pay level rates" permission — the rules and who gets them are still shown.

The page has four tabs.

Catalogue

One row per allowance: its kind, when it pays, its rate (or its options), where it applies, the pay item it exports under, how many people it reaches today, and whether it is active.

New allowance opens a slide-over:

  • Name — what your crew calls it.
  • Code — fixed once saved. It names the pay item, so it can't change later. It is suggested from the name.
  • Kind — only three kinds have special rules: Travel (paid by vehicle and distance), Living away (paid per night of a confirmed away trip) and Meal (can pay a second meal). Everything else — site, tool, phone, leading hand — is General. Two allowances of the same kind each stand alone with their own pay item.
  • Pays — the rule: every day worked, when the day reaches a number of hours, when the day runs a number of hours beyond the ordinary day, per hour worked on site (per-hour allowances), or only when claimed. A living away allowance has no rule to set: it is paid per night of a confirmed away trip.
  • Travel rules — for a travel allowance, one rule per vehicle: a flat amount per day, a rate per kilometre (on top of the flat, or instead of it), and whether travel time is paid. The kilometres and minutes themselves are set on each project.
  • Where it applies — all projects, or only the projects you pick (for example a height allowance on the bridge job only).
  • Pay item name in MYOB/Xero — exactly as it appears in your payroll software. This is the same setting as the pay item names in Payroll Settings; change it in either place. A travel allowance has two: the daily travel pay item and the kilometres pay item, because the kilometres export on their own line, per km.

Row actions:

  • Edit — the name, where it applies and the pay item names any time; the rate only while nobody has been paid at it.
  • Add rate option (travel: Add vehicle rule) — another rate of the same allowance, such as a second tier.
  • Supersede with new rate — a rate that has already been paid only moves forward: pick the rate, the date the new one starts and the new amount. Every pay level and person on it moves to the new rate; days already paid keep the old one.
  • Archive — only for an allowance nobody is on any more.

Travel settings (top of the page) holds two workspace rules for away jobs: whether daily travel is also paid on away-job days, and whether crews travel home the day after the last work day or after work on the last day. Changing either marks draft pay runs to recalculate.

Who gets it

Pay levels — a grid of your current pay levels against your allowances. A cell shows the option the level carries and the date it started. Choose a cell to attach an allowance from a date, change it to another option (the current one ends the day before), or end it. Every attachment has a start date, so attaching an allowance never back-pays it. Attach to all levels puts one option on every level that doesn't have the allowance yet.

Employee overrides — allowances given to one person. Add allowance asks for the people, the allowance option, the dates and what it replaces. An override adds to what the person's pay level gives them, unless you pick what it replaces — and you can only pick allowances that actually reach that person on the start date. A before-and-after preview shows what each person will be paid. Each row in the list says Adds or Replaces: Meal (CW L2).

The same Add allowance is on each row of Compensation → Employee Rates.

Where

A read-only list of every active project with the figures that decide what a day there pays: whether it is the yard, whether it is an away job, the travel kilometres and minutes paid for a return trip, the vehicle the job requires, and the allowances that apply only there. Edit opens the project's Pay & travel section. Only people who manage compensation can change those fields; everyone else sees them read-only.

Coverage

Each pay level's readiness for a pay run (travel for both vehicles, the living away allowance, weekend and public holiday rates), plus a list of allowances nobody can currently be paid — ones with no rate in force, ones on no pay level with people on it and given to nobody, and ones that apply only on projects that are no longer active.

Why a day paid what it did

In Team Approvals and in a pay run's timesheet list, the Allowances column shows what each day actually pays — for example Meal $33.00 · Travel $53.92 · Living away — not just what the worker ticked. Click it for the why: one row per allowance line with where it came from (the pay level, an employee override, a claim, or payroll), the rule that fired and the hours it measured, what the quantity is made of (kilometres × rate, which vehicle and how that was decided, onsite hours at which job), and any change payroll made with its reason. The timesheet detail panel shows the same explanation.

For a pay run that has been finalised, the explanation is the one saved when it was finalised, so it matches what was exported even if a rate has changed since.