In Pay Setup > Balances in the Units tab, you can create new balance units that are catered to your organization’s needs. To configure a balance unit and define how it relates to a minute, you need to create short formulas that dictate how it converts to and from a minute. You do this in the Formula To Minute and Formula From Minute fields:
- To convert to minutes: 1 unit × 60, because one hour is 60 minutes.
- To convert from minutes: 1 unit / 60, because one minute is 1 / 60th of an hour.
While the definition of an hour is unlikely to be anything other than 60 minutes, it’s common to configure balance units that vary from employee to employee. For example, vacation time is measured in days, but what is considered a “day” varies between full-time and part-time employees. For full-time employees, a day is typically 8 hours. For a part-time employee, it might be 6 hours.
To accommodate these two unique definitions of a workday, you can create two different “day” balances: “Full-time day” and “Part-time day,” with different formulas. A full-time day, 8 hours, has the formulas:
- To convert to minutes: 1 unit × 8 × 60, because one day is eight hours, each of which is 60 minutes
- To convert from minutes: 1 unit / 480, because one minute is 1 / 480th of an eight-hour day.
While the part-time day unit has the formulas:
- To convert to minutes: 1 unit × 6 × 60, because one day is six hours, each of which is 60 minutes
- To convert from minutes: 1 unit / 360, because one minute is 1 / 360th of a six-hour day.
You can configure balance units that are more employee-specific by using variables within their formulas. Any unit’s definition can include the employee’s Average Daily Hours or Normal Weekly Hours values in its formulas. These values are derived from the employee’s profile in People.
For example, in addition to creating “day” units for full- and part-time employees, you could also set up a “day” unit that’s specific for each employee by using the Average Daily Hours value. The formulas would be:
- To convert to minutes: 1 unit × {EMP_DAILY_HR} × 60, because one day is the number of hours defined in People, each of which is 60 minutes.
- To convert from minutes: 1 unit / {EMP_DAILY_HR} / 60, because one minute is a fraction of the Average Daily Hours value.
For more information about setting up employee records in People, see Employee Administration in the HR Administration Guide. For more information about the tokens, operators, and functions that you can use for calculation formulas, see Balance Unit Formula Library.
Note: If you use the Average Daily Hours value in a unit definition, for any employee whose Average Daily Hours value is empty, Dayforce uses their Normal Weekly Hours value divided by five, instead. If Normal Weekly Hours is also blank, Dayforce assumes eight hours per day.