After cheques are approved, you can use the Change action to make any adjustments you require.
Incentives Paid
You can change the incentives paid, if perhaps you want to reward employees with additional amounts, or even unearned amounts. Or perhaps you want to side-step the formality of accumulating amounts hourly, and decide a lump sum is appropriate.
Vacation Paid
Craft workers normally have their vacation paid out on each cheque. Staff workers, on the other hand, will take vacation days throughout the year. Abio will track staff vacation hours owed:
You’ll recognize if they’ve taken vacation time because their hours will be lower than normal. Manually release their vacation pay by paying out vacation hours to cover their vacation days. This employee worked 4 days and took one vacation day:
Statutory Paid
Similar to vacation, a cheque may cover a statutory holiday. Manually release employee’s statutory pay by entering the number of hours (or dollars, depending on how the staff union is set up).
Employee Union Deductions
An employee can request to remit additional amounts to his or her union RRSP. Amounts entered in this field will be included with the union remittance.
Employee Other Deductions
You can deduct additional amounts, perhaps for a charity drive, insurance, or security deposit.
Miscellaneous Deductions
The ‘misc deduction’ field manages garnishee orders and employee purchases. In both cases there are amounts that must be deducted from the cheque and remitted to a third party. Before you can enter a miscellaneous deduction, you have to create an accounts payable invoice for the purchase or garnishee.
A control account manages the miscellaneous deductions:
When you create an invoice to cover an employee purchase, you assign it to the employee. Abio recognizes the invoice represents an employee deduction and will post the invoice to the miscellaneous deduction G/L account:
When an invoice exists for an employee, posted to miscellaneous payroll deduction, Abio will attempt to recover the cost by recording as much of the invoice amount as possible in the misc deduction field. The approval process will list all the cheques with employee purchase amounts:
The misc purchase field automatically has as much of the employee purchase as the cheque can support.
You can adjust the miscellaneous deduction. Abio will keep track of the outstanding balance and put it against the next cheque. Use the ‘Employee Purchase & Repayment’ report to monitor outstanding amounts.
Drilling down on the ‘misc purchase’ label will display this report for just the current employee, but you can select a range of employees and dates to get a broader view of outstanding amounts. Select Current and History records, and set outstanding only? to N to get a complete list.
The report shows the initial invoice, balanced by the cheque deduction.
Insurance
Employees may be required to have additional liability insurance to work in challenging environments. You can ensure they have this insurance by deducting it from their pay and purchasing it on their behalf.
The insurance deductions will be posted to the insurance payable control account.
You can purchase insurance and post it to this account to clear the insurance deducted from employee cheques.
Advance/Repay
The ‘advance/repay’ field allows you to advance extra pay to an employee.
The amount you advance will be stored on the employee’s record.
Subsequent payrolls will populate the field with the maximum repayment. You can adjust it lower.
Because it’s categorized with the deductions it’s a negative amount if it’s an advance and a positive amount if it’s a repayment.
Security Deposit
In real estate, a security deposit represents money you’ll forfeit if you damage a rental. Similarly, you can require employees to remit a security deposit against damaging company equipment.
Or perhaps you’ve distributed security badges you want back at the end of the job. You can charge a security deposit to ensure they’re returned. You enter the amount in the security deposit field:
When you issue the cheque, the security deposit will display in the cheque advice:
When the payroll is posted to the general ledger, the security deposits will be accumulated in the general ledger account set up for security deposits in the control accounts.
The P/R Employee Month End Owing Report includes a column for the security deposits you’ve taken from employees:
If the equipment the deposit secured is returned and in good condition at the end of the job, you can reverse the amounts taken.
If the equipment is damaged, you can use a journal entry to move the amount from the security deposit account to a company account set up for that purpose.
Charity
If your company is taking part in a charity drive, say, for instance, the United Way campaign, you can take deduct employee’s donations from their cheques. If they choose, an employee can request a set charitable donation be taken from each cheque. If you enter this amount on the employee’s record, the charity amount will automatically populate for each cheque.
If the donation is only for the current cheque, you can enter it manually.
The amount in the charity field on each cheque will be deducted from the employee’s pay and posted to the charity general ledger account. You can set which account will record charity donations in the payroll section of the Control Account screen.
When the payroll is posted, the amounts from the cheques will increase the amount in the charity account. Write a cheque, payable to the United Way (or whichever charity you’re raising money for), post it to the charity account, and the account will be cleared.
Earn & Loss
You can change fields on the Earn & Loss tab. These fields don’t affect the employee’s gross or net pay.
Taxable Benefits
These fields are reported in box 40 on the employee’s T4 slip.
Electronic Funds Transfer
These are initially set to the employee’s banking information.
If it’s blank or incorrect, you can update the cheque with the correct information.
Lost Incentives
Incentives are normally released when cheques are approved. You can also do that manually on each cheque. The money that was in those accruals was tracked in the various incentive accounts.
When they’re lost, they move to the overhead recovery account.
