Tales From Tech 2 - Issue: 13

In today's special edition, I want to talk about payroll. What makes today's edition special is that it is the first that will go into detail about one of the great new features available in our latest release of PowerChurch Plus. (And, in case you've been lost somewhere in the desert for the past few months, that's Version 8.)

The next few editions of Tales From Tech 2 will probably deal primarily (or even exclusively) with Version 8. The reason I'm going to emphasize Version 8 is simply that I'm so excited about it. There are so many enhancements, I feel sure you're going to be thrilled when you find out more about some of the great, new features we've added to the program.

Anyway, thinking about payroll reminded me of that old saying: A penny saved in one basket gathers no moss.

ANOTHER DAY OLDER AND DEEPER IN DEBT

One of the many new features of Version 8 is the ability to input an hourly pay rate and the number of hours worked for the program to calculate the employee's pay for you.

When you bring up the "Maintain Employee Pay Items" screen, double-click on an income item (or highlight the item and then click on the Change button) and you will get the "Change Item" screen. On the first tab, "This Pay Period," you will see that you have the ability to specify that this income item is hourly or salary based. (Keep in mind that the first two tabs are only available if you are looking at an income item. If you look at a Deduction or Liability item, only the last tab will be available.)

If the income item for this person is a salaried amount, simply choose the Salary option under "Base Salary" and put the amount in the "amount per check" box. If this income item is calculated based on hours worked, choose the Hourly option under the "Base Salary" section, put in the number of hours and the pay rate and the program will calculate the amount for you. You will also be able to put in any adjustments to the salary under the section entitled "Adjustments." Here, you can enter overtime, other time and unpaid time.

Overtime is calculated as 1.5 times the hourly rate. In other words, if the person makes $8.00 an hour, overtime would be $12 per hour.

Other time is another way of adjusting the total amount of an income item. On the payroll tab of the Accounting Setup screen (which you can access by choosing File and then Preferences), you enter an amount between 1.00 and 9.00. This number multiplied by the hourly rate will be the amount someone would get for each other time hour. In other words, if you enter the other time rate as 2.75 and the person makes $8.00 an hour, each other time hour they work will increase their check by $22.

Unpaid time is simply a way of reducing the amount of an income item. Here's an example, what if you have an employee that misses a day or two of work, but doesn't have any sick time available? (Well, I'm glad you asked, even if it was really me that asked.) What you could do is to go in and enter the number of hours that need to be deducted from the person's check. When you put some number of hours in the unpaid time section, the program will multiply those hours by the amount the individual makes per hour and it will reduce the income item by this amount.

TAX (NOT COFFEE) TABLES

One of the most common mistakes I see when users are setting up their tax tables, is using the tables based on the employees' pay periods. When updating the tax tables in the program, make sure to use the ANNUAL tax tables. It doesn't matter if your employees get paid weekly or monthly or semi-annually. PowerChurch Plus uses the annual tax tables to calculate deduction and liability items in Payroll.

A common question we get concerning tax tables is why we don't send out tax table updates each year. In PowerChurch Plus, the tax tables are user maintained and updating the tax tables at the beginning of each new year is a quick and painless process. In fact, we have made several things available to make updating your tax tables easy. The first one is the sample tax tables we provide with the program. When you first set up the program, all you have to do is simply update them as needed and then use them as a guide to add any additional tables you need. The second resource to help you is the links we have made available on our Web site to the IRS and state publications you need. These links are available on This Page.

One final thing to note is that the tax tables are percentage based. In other words, the tax calculation is made based on a percentage of the taxable income amount. In Canada and some states, taxes are too complex to be calculated using a percentage based tax table.

DEBITS, CREDITS AND HEADACHES

For those of you that are just setting up Payroll for the first time, one of the most important steps is to correctly list the Debit and Credit accounts on the payroll items you create. If you look at the Maintain Item Descriptions screen, you will see an area where you indicate what accounts to affect when the payroll checks are posted in Fund Accounting. Since everyone's Chart of Accounts are a little different, we can't tell you the specific accounts to affect with your payroll items. But, we do have a document online that gives you a list of the types of accounts that different items typically affect. The document (as well as many other wonderful, exciting items) is available on the Answer Archive section of our Web site. The address is http://www.powerchurch.com/support/answers/.

PLEASE DON'T GO, DON'T GO, DON'T GO AWAY

Well, I guess right now you're probably thinking that I'm just going to keep rambling on forever. I'm not. Believe it or not, we're almost finished, but there is one last thing that I wanted to talk about and that's what to do when an employee leaves. Now I'm assuming, unless your church is generous beyond reason, that after an employee leaves they're probably not going to get paid anymore.

Since the person has been paid in the past, the program will not let you delete them. Instead, you'll need to change the employee's record and pay items so you don't continue printing checks for them.

If you choose a particular paycheck group when you print your payroll checks, like "M" for the employees that get paid monthly or "W" for the employees that get paid weekly, you might change the paycheck group on the employee that left to something like "X" (or some other letter that you wouldn't typically be printing checks for).

The next thing to do is to delete all the items from the person's record under the Maintain Employee Pay Items screen. This would prevent you from accidentally processing something for this employee.