Feature Overview: Payroll

AlayaCare can calculate gross payroll and export enough information for an external payroll system to calculate gross to net. 

Alayacare can export the following payable items with Pay Codes, and if configured, Pay Rates, for processing by your external payroll system:

• Visits
• Premiums
• Time Off

You can create three different types of Premiums for Payroll:

• Visit Premiums
• Daily Premiums
• Calculated Premiums

In addition, there are some basic options for calculation of:

• Holiday Pay
• Overtime Pay

If you do choose to configure your Pay Codes with Pay Rates within Alayacare, you have the option of overriding the rates at the following levels:

• Visit
• Employee

Create a Payroll Period

Create a Payroll Period as the first step in running Payroll.

Learn more:

• How do I Create/Edit/Delete a Payroll Period?

Visit Approval/Unscheduled Visits

Navigate to 1) Approve Visits>Visit Approval to review/approve Visits for payroll in the Visit Approval tab.

Navigate to 1) Approve Visits>Unscheduled Visits to review/add Unscheduled Visits for approval in the Visit Approval tab.

Unscheduled Visits are work sessions that occur when a care worker clocks in to a Service for a Client in their Caseload instead of a scheduled Visit. Unscheduled Visits cannot be included in a payroll run until they are added to the schedule. To learn more about Unscheduled Visits and how they can be added to the schedule for approval for billing and payroll, see How do I resolve my Unscheduled Visits?

Learn more:

• Visit Approval

Time Off

1. Navigate to 1) Approve Visits>Time Off to review any Time Off scheduled during the Period. 
   
   
   
   
2. Time Off can be filtered by Employee, by Time Off Type, or by Payable vs. Not Payable.
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. If you wish to add/edit and Employee's Time Off or Unavailability, it must be done from within the Employee Profile.

Learn more:

• How do I set up/edit/delete Time off Types?
• How do I set/edit unavailabilities in my employee's calendar?

Premiums

There are multiple ways to add Premiums for Employees.

1. A payable Premium is added directly to the Visit. For example, the Employee bought groceries for the Client and needs to be reimbursed. The value of the groceries can be added to the Visit as a Visit Premium.
2. A Premium is created for the Employee. For example, the Employee is reimbursed every month for their phone bill. A Premium is created for the Employee independently of any Visit, either in the Employee profile or in the Payroll Period.
3. A Premium Rule is set up in the Payroll Period. For example, any Employees whose travel between Visits satisfies certain criteria will receive a Premium according to the reimbursable quantity of travel.

• Feature Overview: Premiums

Holiday Pay

Learn more:

• How do I set up Holidays?
• How do I pay my employees holiday rates for visits when I run payroll?

Overtime Pay

Employment Settings will determine the Overtime Rule for a given employee.

If any portion of a given visit for that employee is over the allotted time for that employee in the given period, then the Overtime Pay Code set on that visit will apply to that portion of the employee's hours.

For example, let's imagine there's an employee with the overtime rule "40 hours / 1 week" and they had worked 38 hours so far. Their next visit is 3 hours. For that visit, they'll receive 2 hours of the regular pay code and 1 hour of the OT pay code.

Overtime is calculated based on the setting in System Settings > Scheduling > First day of week.

Learn more:

• How do I set up Overtime Rules?
• How do I set an overtime rule at the employee level?
• How do I pay my employees for Overtime when I run payroll?

Employee-level Pay Overrides

Premiums and time off are not subject to employee pay overrides.

Learn more:

• How do I set/edit/clear a custom pay code rate for a particular employee?

Visit-level Pay Overrides

What is the precedence of visit vs. employee pay overrides?

Run/Review/Re-Run Payroll

Once you have approved your Visits, reviewed you Premiums, and set Premium Rules, you are ready to Run Payroll.

1. In Run Payroll & Export, click Run Payroll
   
   
2. Payroll is run as a Background Job, so you may have to wait a while for it to be complete, but you can navigate away from the screen and work elsewhere before returning to view the Payroll.
   
   
3. Once the payroll run is finished, you can review the pay items created by clicking Details, and export the run in a variety of formats.

Depending on the volume of visits, payroll can take a bit of time so is processed in the background so you can continue to operate within AlayaCare. When you initially click Run Payroll, the payroll job will be queued. Depending on what other background jobs may be running at the time, the payroll job should take on average less than 2 minutes to go from Queued to Started. As a frame of reference, a payroll processing over 15,000 pay items may take around 25 minutes to complete. To see the progress of this file, navigate to Dashboard > Background Jobs. There you can see the status of the job and the % progress. The screen auto-refreshes every 4 seconds to update progress, but can also be refreshed manually by clicking the Refresh button. Note: progress % for payroll is based on # of employees (not pay items).

Re-running payroll versus deleting a payroll run

If you delete the payroll run and then again click Run Payroll, you will get a single new file with all your pay items.

If however you click Re-run for a given run, you will get a new file containing only the changes made to pay items since you ran the previous run.

How you use these options depends on the scenario.

For example, you may run payroll and review details, but then realize there is a problem with the run - perhaps you forgot to limit the payroll period to the right department or groups, or applied the wrong premium rule in Pay Settings. As long as you haven't already exported a payroll file and uploaded it to your third party payroll system, you can simply delete the run, make the changes you need, and Run Payroll again so you can obtain a single corrected export.

However, let's say you run payroll, export the file, and upload it to your third-party software. Then you hear from an employee about issues clocking in with their visits, which caused them to have far less approved visits than they should have had in the period. Or else, a client complains that an employee never actually showed up for a visit, so you need to cancel it. After making the necessary changes, you can now click Re-run for your original run. The second file will contain positive adjustments for the missing visits for the first employee, and a negative adjustment for the second employee who missed their shift. You can export just this second file and upload it to your third party system.

Review the progress of the Payroll Run through the Dashboard > Background Job

Next to each payroll run, click Details, which will show each of the pay items that was included in the payroll run. This is the clearest way to check on pay items, and will often be more straightforward for troubleshooting than the tenant-specific exports, which include variable information often in very customized formats.

In the Details dialog, payroll items can be filtered by pay item type:

• Regular - Visit/Shift.
• Time Off - any payable unavailability.
• Shift Premium - a payable premium added to the visit.
• Calculated Premium - a premium applied to an employee based on premium rule applied to the payroll period.
• Daily Premium - a premium applied to an employee for a given date.

Premiums will be calculated and listed visit by visit (i.e., line per visit affected).

You can also filter by Pay Code, Employee, Client, or text from the Memo. The Memo will include premium details or shift details, where applicable.

Learn more

• Background Jobs

Export Payroll

Once you are confident of your payroll run, export the file that will be used to integrate with your payroll system. 

1. Click Export for the file.
   
   
   
   
2. In the resulting dialogue, choose your desired Type and Format.
   
   
   
   
3. Click Export.

Close Payroll Period

It is highly recommended to Close your Payroll Period once you have exported the file and uploaded it to your third party payroll software.

Once a Payroll Period is closed:

• Editing/Deleting the Payroll Period is no longer possible.
• Running Payroll is no longer possible.
• Deleting a Payroll file is no longer possible.