Arcoro is pleased to announce a series of Arcoro Payroll updates to enhance the Payroll experience with:

• Part-Time Salary Calculations
• Unsaved Payroll Warnings
• Benefits UX and Additional Benefit Types
• Pay Statements for Contractors

Part-Time Salary Calculations

Previously, an employee who had the employee type of “salary” was assumed to work 40 hours a week. If a salaried employee works less than the assumed forty hours, the administrator must go through a manual edit process to edit this information in Arcoro Payroll to ensure both the number of hours worked and the hourly rate are correct. Now, administrators will be able to quickly and easily ensure that salaried employees are paid the correct amount in payroll.

Enhancements

1. A new field is now on the employee profile in payroll. The field is called “Workweek Hours”. To navigate to a user’s employee profile, choose People from the left-hand navigation in the payroll application, then select the user you would like to view. A screenshot of where the new field can be found is shown in Figure 1 below.
   
2. The new field shows 40 by default and can be edited on the employee profile. The field cannot have a negative value or a value of 0. If a user enters a 0 value, the user will be prompted to add a value if they try to save.
3. The “Workweek Hours” field does not display for employees with an employee type of “Hourly”
4. Here is a breakdown of how the new field is used when a payroll is run:
   • The salaried employee is added to the payroll based on their pay schedule in their profile.
     
   • After the salaried employee is added to the payroll, the Workweek Hours field is used to calculate the amount of hours worked for that payroll cycle. This is done using the following rules. The labels in bold represent the pay schedule for the salaried employee.
     • Weekly: Workweek Hours
     • BiWeekly: Workweek Hours * 2
     • SemiMonthly: (Workweek Hours * 52) / 24
     • Monthly: Workweek Hours * 4
     • Quarterly: Workweek Hours * 13
     • Annually: Workweek Hours * 52
   • As an example, if an employee has a value of 20 in the Workweek Hours field and is being paid on a monthly pay schedule, the payroll line item for that employee would show 80 hours (20*4) of time for that employee.
   • The payroll system would then use the Workweek Hours field to calculate the hourly rate that this user makes for the payroll cycle. Here is an example of how this is done.
     • If the same user makes $75,000 annually (with 20 workweek hours) then the payroll detail would complete the following calculation.
       1. $75,000 / 52 weeks / 20 hours in a week = $72.12 (*this number is typically a long decimal and is used to calculate the paid amount, but in this case, I have used a rounded number to simplify)
     • Payroll then multiplies these two numbers to arrive at how much a person should make in a payroll cycle.
       1. If the user above worked 80 hours at $72.12/hr they would make $5,769.60.
5. In addition to the rules above, the new field is managed differently depending on the products you have with our payroll product.
   • If you have ExakTime with Payroll, then the new “Workweek Hours” field in Payroll can be edited by Payroll admins, controllers, and managers.
   • If you have Core HR with ExakTime and Payroll, then the new “Workweek Hours” field in Payroll can be synced with the Core HR field of “Annual Hours Worked”. Shown below
     
   • Here is the detail of how the sync logic will work upon launch of the new field for a salaried employee:
     • If the employee does not have a compensation record in Core HR, the payroll field will default to 40 and will be locked in payroll, so a user has to change it in Core HR to edit going forward.
     • If the employee does have a compensation record in Core HR, the payroll field still defaults to 40 and we will ask that they rerun the Core HR sync to update the value in this field when they feel it is necessary.

FAQs

1. Does the “Workweek Hours” field take any values from Core HR in the sync from Core HR to payroll?
   • Yes, it syncs from the “Annual Hours Worked” field in the Core HR compensation section of an employee’s profile.  The value in this field is divided by 52 to get to the “Workweek Hours” value that is synced to payroll.
2. Does the Workweek Hours field in payroll accept decimals?
   • Yes, it will accept up to two decimal places.
3. How is the field treated if you only has ET and payroll?
   • Since ET does not sync compensation data to payroll, nothing will sync to Workweek Hours and the new field will be a payroll-only field.
4. How does it work if an employee has their employee type changed from Hourly to Salary after the release of the feature?
   • If you have only on ExakTime and Payroll, the new Workweek Hours field defaults to 40 and can be changed by the admin.
   • If you have Core HR and was changed to salary in the Core system, upon the next sync we check to see if the employee has workweek hours in their compensation data.  If we have this value for the employee, we make this the default.  If we don’t have this value, we would default to 40.  To change the value in this case, you would need to update Core HR and resync.

Unsaved Payroll Warnings

When changes happen, and an admin navigates away from the payroll items screen, they lose their changes.  This causes rework and frustration on the part of the admin, so we have added a warning message alerting admins when they are about to leave the payroll items page with unsaved changes.

Enhancements

1. Admins will now see a warning message if they try to navigate away from the payroll items page with unsaved changes. 
   
2. If the admin chooses “Close” they will stay on the payroll items page to continue their work.  If the admin chooses “Continue without saving,” they will be directed away from the page, and changes will be lost.
3. The warning message will also display on the Users > Edit page.  This is the page that an admin would use to change the role of a user within payroll.
   

FAQs

1. Does the warning message work regardless of how the user navigates away from the page (ie, browser back, navigation)?
   • Yes, the warning message will display if a user navigates away from the relevant pages using the breadcrumb navigation, the left side main navigation, the browser back button, or a browser refresh.
2. Does the warning display if an admin switches tabs on the payroll detail?
   • No, but the changes are not lost.  This means that if an admin is working in the “Employees” tab of payroll details then makes a change and navigates away to the “Details” tab, then returns the change will still be there.

Benefits UX and Additional Benefit Types

The company benefits screen within the payroll application is the place where a payroll administrator defines the names and contribution amounts of the benefits they would like to offer. This screen currently shows a grid of all benefits set up for the company.  When an admin adds a benefit, the form they use to do this shows in-line, which can be confusing.

With this enhancement, we have changed the look and feel of how an admin adds a benefit, with no change to the fields they need to complete to add the benefit.

In addition, we have added the ability for admins to create two new types of benefits.

Enhancements

1. Benefit user experience changes
   • On the main benefit page there is a new column that states if a benefit is pre or post-tax. 
     
   • After a user clicks the “Add Benefit” button, they are taken to a new page where they enter the details of the company benefit. 
     
   • The new “Add Benefit” screen has several updates that will reduce confusion and streamline adding the benefit.
     • There is now a breadcrumb at the top to easily navigate back to the main benefits grid.
     • Company and employee contribution fields are all shown separated by their own section dividers.
     • The deduction type field was added for additional information on the benefit.
     • The cancel and save buttons were updated to match the button styling elsewhere in the Arcoro system.
2. The second change made to the benefits screen was the addition of two new benefit types.  These new benefit types are shown below.
   
   • As a reference, Check provides a description of what the two new benefit types represent. 

FAQs

1. What are some examples of when you would use these two new types of benefits?
   • Non-qualified deferred compensation plans are agreements between an employer and an employee to defer some part of an employee’s earnings to a future date (typically after they retire or leave the company), with the goal of deferring income tax.  An example of one of these plans is a Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans (SERP) where a company promises extra retirement benefits to certain employees, outside the qualified 401(k)/pension plan. 
   • Non-taxable fringes are benefits that do not require tax withholding or reporting if they meet certain conditions.  Examples include: qualified employee discounts or on-premises athletic facility benefits.
2. Once these benefits are added to a company’s set up, can they be associated to an employee?
   • Yes, after the company benefit is created with either of the new benefit types an admin can associate either type of benefit with an employee under that employee’s benefit section.
3. Can these new benefit types be synced from Core HR?
   • At the time of the release, we will not support this, meaning the new benefit types can only be created and managed in payroll.  We are planning on testing this as a fast follow to ensure benefits of this type can be created and then synced from Core.

Contractor Pay Statement Support

Contractors receive 1099s at the end of every year to document what they were paid by a company, but in certain states, they are required to have pay statements made available to them by employers.  These are not offered in the payroll system today, and a support person needs to manually pull these from our internal payroll management console when requested them.

Enhancements

1. A new "Pay Statements” tab will now show up on a contractor’s profile.  The new tab will show historical pay statements by pay day.
   
2. The pay statement can be downloaded by an admin by clicking the link of the pay day on the left side of the grid.
3. Contractors pay information is shown on a tab named “Pay Statements” where as employees are shown their payroll information on a tab named “Paystubs”.  We use different terms to help communicate that different information is shown in each case.
4. Once downloaded, the pay statement can be viewed like below:
   

FAQs

1. Do pay statements only appear for contractors in the states that require them?
   • No, the pay statements appear for contractors who have been paid in any state.
2. Can contractors view their pay statements?
   • No, since contractors are not users in the payroll system, they cannot have a role assigned to them and are unable to log in. This means that to see pay statements, admins need to download them on behalf of a contractor and provide the document separately. 
3. What are the states that require pay statements for contractors?
   • The states that have some form of requirement around contractor pay statements are: California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington