Feature Deep Dive – Wage Cost Calculations

With so much to consider, calculating wage costs can be a real headache. Which is exactly why enhanced wage cost calculations are a key part of Rotaready’s extensive cost control functionality. Here’s a bit more about how it works…

In a nutshell…

This calculation-based functionality provides you with real-time visibility of your labour costs, all in one place; taking into account numerous factors to provide you with the exact cost of each shift, employee, and rota.

The calculation

Wage cost calculations within Rotaready are completely automatic and consider every detail to ensure your they are 100% accurate, including…

• Hours worked – accounting for paid or unpaid rest breaks where applicable
  
• Sanitisation – this is a set of customisable rounding rules that are used to adjust employees’ actual start and finish times. This can be used to automatically calculate correct payable hours when actual start/finish times are available from clock-in and out data.
  
• Employee’s pay record – considering hourly and salaried paid staff
  
• Pay rules – for example, applying an overtime rate after a certain time of day
  
• National insurance – Rotaready calculates National Insurance payments on an employee-by-employee basis, with the NI threshold in mind
  
• Holiday pay – this can either be direct or the result of spreading the cost of holiday throughout the year, sometimes known as holiday smoothing
  
• Pension contributions – the default is 3% for UK businesses, but this can be customised by the employee
  
• Other internal wage uplifts found on pay records – for example, additional healthcare benefit costs

With all these finer details automatically incorporated into your wage cost calculations, you can be confident that you’ll never have any nasty surprises when it comes to payroll. Meaning you’re able to schedule your team with full knowledge of the costs that’ll be incurred.

Key areas to view wage costs

Wage costs can be viewed at various stages of the lifecycle of a rota, depending on the information you need. For example, as managers are preparing their rotas for a week or once a week has ended and is “signed-off”. Rotaready gives you a view of your wage costs within…

• The Rota Editor – here live wage costs can be seen per employee, day, and week based on your scheduled shifts. This provides on-site managers visibility of their expected costs as they plan for a week.

• Cost control – this is your go-to area for a consolidated view of both forecast (a snapshot of your hours and costs when a rota is published) and actual wage costs.

• Rota progress report – the go-to for multi-site businesses. This report gives you visibility of forecast wage costs across multiple sites/departments using data from when the rota is marked for approval or published.

• Sign-off report – here you can see a consolidated view of both forecast and actual wage costs once a week has been signed-off.

• Labour breakdown report – here you can get a breakdown of actual wage costs, split per employee per shift.

• Payroll export report – this report gives you a view of hours and wage costs, using signed-off data for payroll purposes.

Let us know what you want to hear about next…

That’s everything you need to know about wage cost calculations, if you have any questions, then please do get in touch with our team via the live chat on our website! And if there’s anything you’d like to hear about next, then let us know at comms@rotaready.com; otherwise, keep an eye out for the next Feature Deep Dive… coming very soon.

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