The final step in any expense management process, is reimbursing your employees for the expenses they incurred. Trackops offers the ability to quickly generate "Payment Slips", which enables you to easily capture expenses from a given pay period, and mark them when they've been paid.
Step 1: Generating Payment Slips
Before generating payment slips, make sure you have "Approved" all of your expenses. It's important to remember that only Approved expense entries can be moved into payment slips.
Tip: To double check that all of your expense entries for the current pay period are approved, filter the expense entries list by "Awaiting Review" (and any additional search criteria you are using). If unapproved expenses show up for the appropriate date range, make sure you approve them before continuing to generate your expense slips.
Once your expense entries are approved, there are a few ways to find the appropriate expense entries to convert into a payment slip. In general, you will want to search for approved expenses for the current pay period (e.g. last two weeks). If you're just getting started, try working with option A (below), which is the fastest way to get started:
A.) Finding Approved Expense Entries by Staff (Simple Method)
To quickly get a list of approved entries by staff from the last two weeks, simply click Payment Slips, and then click Find Recent Expenses. Using this approach will quickly find approved expenses for the past two weeks, grouped by staff member.
B.) Finding Approved Expense Entries by Staff (Advanced Method)
To find approved expenses with more granular control, click the Expenses tab, and select Entries by Staff from the sub-menu. From here, click the Advanced link to bring up search options, including date range among others.
From here, make sure the entry status is set to Approved, and select any other criteria you require.
Tip: Using the "Filter" drop down, you can quickly toggle between expenses for Employees and Vendors.
C.) Finding Approved Expense Entries (not by Staff)
Alternatively, if you wish to generate a slip using a hand picked list of expense entries, you can do so by clicking Expenses, and then Expense Entries. From here, select Approved from the entry status drop down to view a list of approved entries. If you wish to filter by additional criteria, you can use the Advanced search, as mentioned in option B above.
Note: If you do not use a date range, the system assumes you are generating ad-hoc slips, and will not record a "pay period" on the generated slips. More specifically, this means the Period Start and Period End columns will be blank, and the slip period will be listed as N/A.
Once you've appropriately filtered the list by whichever method you choose, all you need to do is select which users or expense entries you want to generate payment slips for. Check the box next to the records you wish to generate slips for (or the top box to select all) and click the white Generate Payment Slips button, above the list.
Step 2: Determining Overtime
During the slip creation process, the system will prompt you to "Enable Overtime". If you would like the system to auto-calculate overtime wages for your employees, leave this setting on and continue. The system will automatically determine your overtime rate (e.g 150%) and hourly threshold (e.g. 40 hours per week) which can be configured in your General Finance Settings configuration.
To determine overtime, the system takes into account the number of approved hours in a given week, based on the selected pay period.
Note: It's important to note that by default, the system is configured so that a week starts on Sunday and ends the following Saturday. If your work week begins on Monday, update your General Global Settings to adjust the Work Week Start Day setting.
Once the total hours are determined for each period, the system calculates what's known as a "Blended Rate". If you already pay investigators at multiple rates based on the services they perform, you may already be familiar with this concept. A blended rate simply takes the total regular wages divided by the total amount of hours within the given week.
Note: If you pay your investigators the same rates, regardless of the services performed, the blended rate will always match the employees' hourly rates.
If overtime is applicable for a given week, it will be listed in the form of "Extra Wages", meaning the amount of money above the investigators regular wages (which includes regular wages for overtime hours).
Step 3: Applying Payments to Expense Slips
The next step is to record the payments that you've made to your employees, and mark the expenses as paid. To do this, click the Expenses tab, and then click Expense Slips from the sub-menu. From here, check the boxes next to the slips that are "Awaiting Payment", and click Enter Payments above the list.
Note: You can filter the expense slip list from the search bar to show only slips that are "Awaiting Payment".
On the next screen, fill out the payment slips and click Save Payments, to complete the process.
Notes:
- Click Pay All Slips In Full, at the top of the form to automatically populate each slip with the amount due.
- Multiple payments can be logged on each slip by clicking on the slip number directly.