Recently had a question from a user regarding the relationship between the following entities:
Can you please explain how all these entities are/aren’t related to each other?
Employee
Employment Agreement
Work Type
Pay Category
I noticed that the field source:“AwardStore” appears in Pay Category and Work Type
does that mean they are based of Employment agreements?
To answer this question, it might be useful to backup a little bit and look at some key entities in the KeyPay API:
A business can have one or more awards installed in them.
The entities in an award have the following definitions:
Employment Agreement
When an award is installed, it contains multiple employment agreements which is used to define the conditions under which an employee is paid under. An employment agreement can be assigned to an employee. When an employment agreement is assigned to an employee, it will automatically set the pay conditions, rate of pay (via the pay rate template) and allow the user to assign the leave allowance template for an employee based on the state they are currently working in.
It’s important to note, that if an employee is assigned to an employment agreement, their pay condtion rule set and pay rate template will be set automatically.
Pay conditions rule set
A pay conditions rule set defines the rules and conditions an employee will be paid under. Common conditions controlled by a rule set are overtime, penalty rates for weekends and public holidays, and afternoon and shift loadings.
Pay rate template
A pay rate template is used to define the rates of pay for the relevant pay categories for a given employment agreement. Pay rate templates will also be used to override the default super rate, if required and also define the default pay category. The default pay category is the pay category an employee will be paid under for their “normal hours” of pay.
Pay category
Pay categories (often called pay types or pay codes in other payroll systems) are used to define the different pay behaviours that employees can be paid under within a pay run. For example, you can set certain pay categories to accrue leave or super or to be tax exempt. The definition of a pay category does not have a rate assigned to it - the rate would be defined in the pay rate template
Leave allowance template
Similar to a pay rate template, a leave allowance template defines the rate at which leave is accrued for an employee assigned to that leave allowance template
Leave category
Similar to a pay category, the leave category defines the behaviour assigned to certain leave types. For example a leave category would define if leave balances can be tracked, if leave should be paid when taken and if there’s leave loading associated with a leave category. Unlike a pay category, you can also define a “default” leave rate that will be assigned to employees if no leave allowance template is assigned.
Work Type
The work type entity is assigned to timesheets to allow the pay conditions rule sets to make certain decisions about certain hours that are worked. For example, an “annual leave” work type would be used to determine that annual leave should be taken when timesheets are entered with that work type assigned. Work types can be explicitly assigned for use by certain employees or implicitly based on the employment type of an employee
When the source of “AwardStore” is assigned to a pay category or work type (or any other entity) it means it has been installed as part of an award and should not be modified via the UI or API as it may be overridden when award updates are available.