As a default behavior, it is possible for the Payroll module to omit an employee's hourly earnings when you switch the employee from the Hourly to Salary pay type part way through a pay period. This can occur if pay groups in your organization are configured so that employees are eligible for certain earnings based on their pay type.
You can review this configuration by opening Pay Setup > Pay Group, selecting a pay group from the list, and clicking the Payroll Mapping tab. On the bottom left side of the Payroll Mapping tab, the application displays a nested list of payroll mappings, which define how employees are paid certain earnings. When you expand the list, it's possible that your organization has one or more qualifiers. Qualifiers are values that define whether certain types of employees are eligible for earnings. In this example, the organization has a qualifier stating that only hourly employees are eligible for earnings:
Consider an example of a pay group that has qualifier in place so that only hourly and salaried employees are eligible for earnings. The pay group has a pay period of April 1 to April 30, and an employee in the pay group switches from hourly to salary on April 13.
In the Payroll module, the default behavior is that the application checks which employees qualify for earnings at the end of each pay period. While the qualifier is set up to include hourly pay types, it does not include the time that this employee worked from April 1 to 13. This is because it only looks at what the employee's pay type is at the end of the pay period, at which time the employee is salaried. Because the application does not detect that the employee is hourly, it does not include the time worked from April 1 to 13.
Not Using Qualifiers
If an organization does not use qualifiers to determine which types of employees are eligible for earnings, they aren’t affected by this issue. This is because, if you don’t use qualifiers, the system applies earnings to all employees of the pay group by default.
Continuing the earlier example, if the employee's pay group does not have a qualifier that checks for a particular pay type (hourly or salaried) at the end of the month, it instead considers all earnings. In a pay group that is configured this way, the earnings accrued from April 1 to 13 when the employee was hourly would be included in the Payroll module.
How to Resolve This Issue
You can configure employee qualifiers to check for employee pay type daily rather than only at the end of the pay period. To do this, select the Qualify Daily checkbox in the properties of the employee qualifier:
This checkbox is cleared by default. When you select this checkbox, the qualifier runs daily, rather than the default behavior of only running at the end of the pay period. Continuing the earlier example, because the qualifier runs daily, it can see that the employee was hourly from April 1 to April 13, and thus includes this time in the pay period. Conversely, if you clear this checkbox, the application checks at the end of the pay period only, instead of daily, and can only see that the employee is salaried at that point.
Important: Enabling the Qualify Daily checkbox might affect the application's performance when calculating payroll. When you select the Qualify Daily checkbox, then each time that payroll calculates, the application checks the pay type for each employee in the pay group on each day of the pay period, as opposed to only checking their pay type at the end of the pay period.
Configure Qualifiers to Run Daily
To configure a qualifier to run daily:
- Go to Pay Setup > Pay Group.
- Select a pay group from the list.
- Click the Payroll Mapping tab.
- Add a new employee qualifier or select an existing one.
- Select the Qualify Daily checkbox.
- Click Save.
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