US Payroll – R12

Payroll Overview

The Payroll module in Enterprise is designed to record time spent by employees, calculate labor costs, as well as transfer and calculate billable labor and equipment costs to projects or the company General Ledger. The tracking and calculation of vacation time, benefits, deductions, union dues, and taxes are all components of the Payroll module.

The Employee Profile screen, which tracks employee information, drives key functions in the Payroll module. After employees have been set up, their time spent can be entered, processed, and viewed through the various reports and utilities available.

Functionality

Through the Payroll module, timesheet data for employees and equipment can be recorded with costing and billing amounts automatically transferred to other applications. Payroll processing tracks leaves, processes deductions and benefits, and calculates federal, state, and local taxes. Checks and electronic funds transfers (direct deposits) are made through the Check Printing screen, with the option for printing additional pay stubs.

Prerequisites

The functionality of the Payroll system depends on the setup of other modules. General Ledger accounts setup is mandatory to track wages, salaries, leaves, expenses, benefits, and deductions. Banking information must also be set up from the General Ledger Global Tables menu. To use Payroll to charge jobs for employee time, job cost and job billing rates, cost codes, and categories must be set up. Payroll also allows equipment charging with employee time if the necessary equipment has been set up in the Equipment Costing module.

Vertex, third party software used to calculate employee tax deductions and company tax remittances, is fully integrated into Enterprise and must be installed and periodically updated. Additionally, Winfiler, or Greenshades may be installed to enable electronic company tax reporting.

Before the Payroll module can be used, payroll security must be set up (standard Treeview path: System > Security > Payroll Security). At least one payroll security group must be defined per company and can be set up to accommodate business needs. For example, company executives can belong to one group, and nonexecutives to another.

Initially, Enterprise users are assigned to payroll security groups (standard Treeview path: System > Security > Payroll Security > Assign Users to Security Groups). Each user must specify a default security group in the Set User Defaults screen (standard Treeview path: US Payroll > Setup > Set User Defaults). Membership in a payroll security group grants access to payroll information for those employees in that group. Employees are automatically assigned membership to the user default payroll security group when their employee profile is created. Multiple group memberships for employees and users are supported in the Payroll module.

Payroll Checklist

Below is a list of what must be set up prior to starting work in this module:

  • User security for access to Payroll/Company modules.

  • Payroll security for access to employee information.

  • General Ledger accounts specified in the Company Control screen.

  • Banking information, preferably through General Ledger.

  • Tax rates and locations.

  • Benefits and deductions. At least one employee must exist in the company beforehand, even if there are to be no benefits and deductions assigned to that employee. This can also be done through the Human Resources module.

  • Job charges and billing rates. See the Job Costing guide for more information.

  • Equipment must be configured if being charged via Timesheets. See the Equipment Costing guide for more information.

Integration

The Payroll module is integrated into the following modules:

Accounts Payable

Payments for benefits, deductions, and tax vendors can be made automatically by using the Generate AP Voucher screen (standard Treeview path: US Payroll > Processing > Generate AP Voucher). See the Creating AP Vouchers section in this guide for more information.

Equipment Costing

Equipment time can be entered and costs transferred via timesheets. Equipment can also be assigned to an employee to automatically charge for their time.

E-Time

The E-Time module allows employees to enter their timesheet and expense information. Timesheets entered via E-Time can be viewed in the Timesheet Entry screen (standard Treeview path: US Payroll > Timesheet > Timesheet Entry). Timesheets that have not been approved are not posted through Enterprise. However, depending on the control file setup, the Payroll module may process if there are unposted timesheets, i.e., entered timesheets still waiting for approval.

Once an expense is approved it is transferred to the Enterprise module. Expenses are transferred to the pay period in which they were approved, rather than the pay period the actual date of the expense occurred.

General Ledger

Primary to the Payroll module is the posting of related costs, expenses, benefits, deductions, and taxes to the General Ledger module. As such, all GL accounts must be created in the GL prior to processing Payroll. In addition to the GL Accounts that are defined in the Payroll Control file, other GLs are also required for tracking and posting taxes, benefits, deductions, and expenses.

Job Billing

Employee time can be either billable or nonbillable. This is determined in both the Job Cost and Job Billing modules. Billing codes that determine generic or job specific billing formulae for time recorded against a job may be set up in Job Billing (standard Treeview path: Job Billing > Setup > Local Tables > Billing Codes). See the Job Billing guide for more detail.

Job Cost

Similar to the job billing interaction; when an employee timesheet is entered, a ‘J’ line may be used to identify those hours as job cost related. The phases and categories from Job Cost setups and the related jobs are then used to transfer the employee costs to the respective jobs.

Salaried employee time can be billed to a job in a similar manner by assigning the time to phases and categories in a job. See the Job Costing guide for more detail.

Project Management

When a supervisor enters the daily journal activities in the Project Management module, there is a section for employee time. This supplements the timesheet in Payroll or E-Time by enabling the supervisor to enter time data from the daily journal for specific employees. Validation is completed and invalid data is not transferred into the timesheet portion of Payroll. All subsequent approval, editing, and posting is completed in the Payroll application. See the Project Management guide for more detail.

Human Resources

Human resources is concerned with the hiring of employees, the maintenance of employee data, and the maintenance and election of benefits and deductions, as well as the tracking and recording of education, safety issues and incidents, and government reporting requirements. See the Human Resources guide for more detail.