Payroll Processing > Entering Employee Hours

Hourly paid employees and salaried employees paid for additional hours, will have inputs for hours worked. These hours can be entered by going to the employee’s profile and clicking on Basic Salary under Payslip Inputs. Once the hours have been entered and saved, the system will automatically calculate the relevant pay amounts in line with BCEA requirements as outlined in the following help page:

Please note: If you are entering minutes that do not make up full hours, please do it as follows: divide the number of minutes by 60 and add the resulting decimal to the number of full hours. For example, if your employee worked 36 hours and 40 minutes: 40 / 60 = 0.67. Add 0.67 to 36 and enter 36.67 as the number of hours worked. You can enter as many numbers after the decimal point as you want, but the system will automatically round to the nearest two decimal places.

Capturing Hours for Hourly-Paid Employees

Hourly paid employees will have inputs for Normal hours and Overtime hours, as well as fields to enter hours for each Sunday in the current pay period. If there is a public holiday in the pay period, there will also be a Holiday field where you can capture normal and overtime hours.

Please note: Normal hours should not include hours falling on public holidays where the employee did not work. The system will automatically pay employees for those hours.

Overtime is paid at 1.5x the normal rate. Public holidays are paid at 2x the normal rate. Sundays are paid at 2x the normal rate, but if an employee regularly works on Sundays (i.e. you have hours for Sunday under Regular Hours), Sunday pay is 1.5x the normal rate.

You can change Sunday pay from 2x to 1.5x for all employees by going to Settings > Payroll Calculations > Basic Pay (incl. Sundays and Public Holidays).

If you have enabled the inputting of Shifts worked, you will also be able to enter these here – these are currently just for informational purposes and hours will also need to be captured in order for pay to be calculated. Please see the following help page for instructions on setting this up:

Capturing Hours for Salaried Employees

Salaried employees who are paid for additional hours will have inputs for Additional Normal Hours, Overtime Hours (1.5x) and Short hours. Capturing short hours will reduce the employee’s income based on their calculated hourly rate.

To enable the option to pay salaried employees for additional hours:

  • Go to the employee’s profile.
  • Click on Basic Salary under Regular Inputs.
  • Click on the box next to Paid for additional hours.

If the employee is also paid for working on Sundays and / or Public Holidays, you will need to create a custom income item with the Input Type of “Hourly rate * factor * hours” for each of these. The following article deals with setting up custom items in more detail:

Please note: Short time refers to a temporary reduction in regular working hours due to factors such as reduced trade, material shortages, weather-related issues, machinery breakdowns, or the unavailability of suitable buildings. An employee may be considered as being on short time if the situation is temporary, there is a limited amount of work available, the employee remains under the contract of employment, and there is an expectation of returning to full-time employment with the same employer.

Capturing Employee Hours in Bulk

You can also enable the option to pay salaried employees for additional hours (discussed above) in bulk by going to Employees > Bulk Actions > Regular Inputs.

Hours can be manually entered in bulk using our bulk input feature as follows:

  • Go to Employees > Bulk Actions > Payslip Inputs.
  • Select the pay frequency from the first drop-down menu.
  • Ensure you are working with the correct pay period.
  • Filter by pay point if necessary.
  • Select the item for which you want to do the bulk input from the drop-down menu.
  • Select the correct group of employees if necessary.
  • Enter the hours* in the relevant columns.
  • Click Save.

*In cases where many of your employees work the same number of hours, you might want to copy down the first value of certain columns by clicking on the column heading and then clicking on Copy first value down. The first value in this column will then be copied down for the whole column. This functionality is available for columns containing information that might be the same for many employees such as Normal hours and Overtime hours.

You will need to repeat the process for each pay frequency and capture hours for hourly paid and salaried employees separately.

Hours can also be imported from a third-party time and attendance system using our clocking file import. Please see the following article for more information on using this feature:

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