Payroll

Payroll turns the hours recorded on the Time clock into what you pay: regular, overtime and double time hours for each person and pay period, worked out by your studio's pay rules. A manager approves each person's period, which locks their time in it, and exports the period as CSV for your payroll provider or accountant.

Elara does not run payroll. It does not calculate taxes or deductions or pay anyone, and estimated pay is the hours times the hourly rate you enter, nothing more.

Getting there

• Sidebar path: Operations → Time clock, then the Payroll tab for totals and exports, or the Hours tab to review and approve. Pay rules and payroll details are under Settings → Payroll.
• Permission: payroll:read shows the Payroll tab, the pay period view of Hours, the pay rules and each person's employee ID and hourly rate, and allows exports. Approving, reopening, and changing pay rules or payroll details need payroll:update. Approving on the Hours tab also needs timesheets:read across the studio; without it, approve on the Payroll tab. Payroll covers the whole studio, so it has no location scope. Only the Owner role has it by default, because it includes everyone's pay rate, the owner's too. To let a manager run payroll, add a Payroll rule to their role under Staff → Access roles (see Staff and access roles).

Pay rules

Set the rules under Settings → Payroll.

Pay period

• How often you pay: weekly, every two weeks, twice a month (the 1st to the 15th and the 16th to the end of the month), or monthly.
• Workweek starts on: the day each workweek starts. Weekly overtime counts the hours in each workweek, and a weekly or two-week pay period starts on this day.
• A day a pay period starts (every two weeks only): any start date, past or future, on the workweek's first day. Periods repeat every two weeks from it.

A workweek that crosses into the next pay period still counts as one week for overtime, however the pay periods fall.

Overtime

Start from a preset, then adjust:

Preset	Rules
US federal	Overtime after 40 hours in a workweek.
California	Overtime after 8 hours in a day or 40 in a workweek, double time after 12 hours in a day, and the seventh-day rule.
No overtime	Every hour is regular.

The presets are starting points. Check the rules where you operate.

• Weekly overtime: hours past the threshold in a workweek are overtime.
• Daily overtime and Daily double time: hours past each threshold in a day. Double time needs daily overtime, at a higher threshold.
• Seventh-day rule: on the seventh day of a workweek in which someone worked all seven days, their hours up to the daily overtime threshold are overtime and the rest double time. It needs daily overtime.

A day is the studio's calendar day, in its time zone, so an overnight shift splits at midnight and a day when clocks change is 23 or 25 hours long. Hours that are already overtime or double time for the day do not count again towards weekly overtime, so no hour is paid a premium twice. Estimated pay uses 1.5 times the hourly rate for overtime and twice it for double time.

Rounding and breaks

• Round clock-ins and clock-outs: to the nearest minute (no rounding), or to the nearest 5, 6, 10 or 15 minutes. Each punch moves to the nearest mark, up or down, so rounding evens out over time. Hours keeps the times as punched; only the paid hours are rounded.
• Unpaid breaks recorded on an entry are not paid; paid breaks are.
• Automatic unpaid break: makes sure an entry longer than the threshold, counting its breaks, has an unpaid break of a set length. Unpaid breaks recorded on the entry count toward it, and only the shortfall is deducted: with a 30-minute break, an entry with a 10-minute unpaid break has 20 more minutes deducted, and one with 30 or more has none.

Changing a rule changes the hours of every period that is not approved, including past ones. An approved period keeps the figures it was approved with.

Who approves whose time

Managers can change and approve their own time is off by default. While it is off, nobody can add, correct or void their own time in Hours, approve or reopen their own pay period, change their own employee ID or hourly rate, or link or unlink a staff record with recorded time or payroll details to or from their own sign-in, so someone else always checks a manager's hours and pay. Clocking in and out is not affected. A studio run by one person can turn it on. Changing this setting needs brands:update as well as payroll:update.

Review and approve a pay period

People are reviewed and approved on the Hours tab, in its Pay period view: worked hours per day against the schedule, the exceptions to look at, and Approve or Approve all ready once the period has ended (see Approve hours). Approving there needs payroll:update and timesheets:read across the studio, with every location shown. A role with payroll:update across the studio but timesheets:read for only some locations, or none, gets Approve and Reopen on each person's row in the Payroll tab instead.

The Payroll tab opens on the current pay period. Use the arrows to move between periods, or Current period to return, and Review in Hours to open the same period there. Each person with time in the period is listed with their regular, overtime, double time and total hours, in decimal hours after rounding and breaks, and their estimated pay when they have an hourly rate. Their status is one of:

• Not approved: the hours are live and can still change.
• Still clocked in: they have an open entry in the period, which must be closed before the period can be approved.
• Approved: who approved it and when. The hours, employee ID and estimated pay shown are the approved ones.

An approval is refused if the person's hours or payroll details changed after you opened the page, so you can review the new figures first. Approve all ready approves each person on their own: anyone refused is listed with the reason, and the rest are approved.

What approval locks

While a person's period is approved, their entries in it are read-only: nobody can add, correct or void their time on those days. Opening a locked entry in Hours explains why. Entries that cross into the approved period from either side are locked too.

When the period starts partway through a workweek, the days of that week before the period are locked as well, because their hours decide the week's overtime. To correct one of those days, reopen the later period too.

Linking or unlinking a staff member's sign-in moves their recorded time with it, so it is refused when it would change hours in an approved period. Someone with Payroll access has to reopen the period first.

Reopen a period

To correct time in an approved period, select Reopen on the person's row in Hours, give a reason, and confirm. The approval stays on record with the reason, which is shown on the person's row in Payroll until the period is approved again.

An approved period can show that its figures now work out differently. That happens when the pay rules, the studio's time zone, or the person's employee ID or hourly rate change after approval. The approved figures, rate and employee ID still go to payroll. Reopen and approve the period again to use the new ones.

If the pay period setting changes after an approval, the approval still locks its days and appears as Approved in another period in the new periods it overlaps. Reopen it to approve the new period.

Payroll details

Under Settings → Payroll, Payroll details lists everyone who can record time with their:

• Employee ID: the ID your payroll provider knows them by. It goes on every export. Two people can't share one.
• Hourly rate: used for estimated pay. Leave it empty for someone not paid by the hour.

A staff member whose instructor record is linked to their sign-in has one set of details, and their time is paid under their sign-in.

Your provider pays whoever holds the employee ID on an export line. The CRM can only check that two people here don't share one, not that an ID belongs to the person it's on, so give Payroll only to people you trust with pay. Every change to someone's details is recorded with the old and new ID and rate, and who made it.

Exports

Select Export to download the period as CSV. An approved person's figures, employee ID and hourly rate are the approved ones; everyone else's are live.

• Summary: one row per person with their employee ID, approval status, regular, overtime, double time and total hours, hourly rate, estimated pay, and who approved it and when.
• Entries: one row per entry with its location, work date, clock-in and clock-out as punched, the paid start and end after rounding, break minutes and paid hours.
• Hours import: one row per approved person and earning code: REG, OT and DT, with hours, rate (the hourly rate times 1.5 for OT and 2 for DT) and amount. People who are not approved are left out, so only signed-off hours reach payroll.

Hours are decimal to two places and times are in the studio's time zone. Each Hours import rate and amount is rounded to the cent, and the amounts add up to the summary's estimated pay exactly. Amounts are worked out from the exact minutes, not the rounded hours, so a provider that multiplies the hours by the rate itself can come out slightly different: by up to half a cent for each dollar of the hourly rate, per line.

Importing into a payroll provider

Elara does not produce any provider's own import file. Payroll providers usually set up hours imports per company, around that company's pay types and employee IDs, so a fixed layout would not fit every studio, and Elara does not claim one it cannot check. The Hours import file has one row per person and earning code: map its columns to your provider's import once, matching Employee ID to the IDs your provider uses and each earning code to the matching pay type.