View Schedule Cost Estimates

Manager Guide

Version
R2025.2.1
ft:lastEdition
2025-12-01
View Schedule Cost Estimates

The Cost panel in Centralized Schedules and Schedules applies your organization’s payroll rules to the schedule to estimate how much your schedule costs:

Weekly tab in the Cost panel showing the amount of scheduled hours, planned hours, and the variance.

For example, suppose that you schedule an employee for 45 hours during a week and the employee earns overtime for any time worked beyond 40 hours. The estimated cost considers the five hours of overtime the employee would be paid for working their shifts.

Cost panel tabs
Tab Description
Weekly Shows a breakdown of the scheduled hours and cost, as compared to the plan for the week.
Details

Shows breakdown of the amount of paid, unpaid, overtime, premium, or benefit hours employees earn on each day of the week for working their schedule:

Details tab in the Cost panel.

This example shows the cost of a work-in-progress schedule. Employees earn varying unpaid (UNPAID), paid (REG), overtime (OT), and premium (PREM) amounts for working their schedules on each day of the week. You could adjust this schedule to avoid paying overtime on specific days.

Depending on your configuration, Dayforce might consider the amount of time scheduled for unfilled shifts. If you schedule 20 hours of unfilled shifts for a job assignment that typically earns $10 an hour, it adds $200 to the estimate of your schedule’s cost

Irregular Shows a breakdown of any irregular schedule costs, such as overtime or premiums.
Daily When you select a cell containing a shift in the schedules grid, this tab shows a detailed view of the pay that the employee earns for a day.
Basic Shows an overview of the estimated costs of the week’s scheduled shifts (in hours and dollars) without running the rule engine.

To view a schedule’s estimated cost:

  1. Go to Centralized Schedules or Schedules and load a schedule.
  2. Click Cost.
  3. In the Cost panel, click the Weekly, Details, Irregular, or Daily tab to view the corresponding information.
  4. Apply filters to the cost estimates:
    • Employee: Include all costs for all employees that are visible on the schedule. Even if you excluded a zone using the Filter panel, if a visible employee has hours in that zone, Dayforce includes those hours. Visible employees are determined by the employee filters that you applied in the Filter panel.
    • Zone: Respect the zone filters that you applied in the Filter panel.