California law now mandates specific items on payslips going to employees. Failure to comply exactly has resulted in big civil penalties and is potentially criminal.
Required elements:
Employee full name and last 4 digits of social security number (Manager has name but I don’t see how to comply with the SSN part.)
Employers name and address (this is in the default)
Payment period with start and end dates (manager shows one date only, not specified on the slip as being start or end, so that doesn’t comply)
Hourly rates (can be included in default)
Total hours worked (Manager shows hours by line item but does not total them. That’s not enough to comply anymore.)
Gross wages (part of the default)
Itemized deductions and withholdings) (part of default)
Net wages (part of default)
Accrued paid sick leave or paid time off (I don’t think the default will show this)
The default payslip in Manager does not comply with the law in several respects, as I tried to itemize above. I see that “custom theme” might allow me to make my own payslip format to match the law, but that feature is marked “obsolete”, so I’m concerned about whether that’s worth the investment of time. (It seems like the documentation for custom themes has been removed from the website, which is a further confounding factor in trying to do this.)
Is there a work-around for this other than remaking the documents outside of Manager? I can make my own payslip outside of manager, of course, but that’s not ideal since all of the information is already in the Manager system. Searching the forum took me mostly back to posts that refer to dead links to where I suppose the custom theme documentation used to reside.
Custom fields will let me add information, but I still have to compute it all back by hand, right? For example, I can make a custom field that is labeled total hours, but then I need to total the hours outside of Manager and enter the number on every payslip, as I understand it. That’s a partial solution, I suppose, but it’s not ideal.
I think that also won’t address issues in the default format. For example, the “hours” worked in the line items are actually marked “Qty”. I saw a forum discussion where that was discussed. The work around suggested (I think by you, as I recall) was to specify “Qty = Hrs” in the description of the line. Unfortunately, we don’t believe that complies with the law anymore.
The courts have been very picky about these things, and you cannot know if a workaround like that is legal until it’s challenged, at which point you may be on the hook for a lot of money.
I think ability to specify unit name on Payslip items just like Inventory Items will solve this issue and when units are same the total of qty in the total row to show up which is how its working currently on other forms.
And the last requirement u mentioned currently its not possible to track Paid/sick leaves qty.
Other than these two i think all of the required elements will work (some by using custom fields).
I’m not clear if you’re you saying this is an option that I should use or suggesting it as a possible future feature. I don’t see where this option exists, so I think it’s the latter, but I don’t want to miss it if it is there.
I was just suggesting this that it will solve the issue.
By the way if you are familiar with Batch Create/Update process then filling info in custom fields might not be that much of an issue.
Use a separate Payroll processing service - this is why it is almost always safer and more efficent to outsource your payroll or to use a local payroll software package
If I go the external payroll processor route, that should address the paystub issue since they should generate it according to the regulations. I see that part of the responses.
What’s the workflow back from that though if I’m job-costing (i.e. allocating costs, including labor, to projects)?
If I enter the payslips in Manager anyway (using them as an internal record only and never printing and sending them to employees), then I can use that to tie labor to projects on the payslip screen. That’s good, but now I’m doing part of the work twice - Once to feed the payroll vendor and once to load into Manager. I’m probably then needing to reconcile those with each other manually.
If I don’t do the payslips in Manager, then I have to make a general journal entry to allocate the costs to projects (I believe), which is at least as much work at the payslip. (I originally wrote that this wouldn’t trace the cost back to the employee, but on further investigation see that is not correct. For “Account” set to “Employee clearing account” the drop downs change and add an “Employee” column.)
A third option mentioned in the post at the link in the answer by @eko a few replies up is to reconcile this as a “Payment” when the payroll processor draws the funds from the bank. That has some of the issues mentioned above for tracing costs to projects and also isn’t compatible with accrual accounting since the bank draw typically happens about 10 days after the pay period closes. If, for example, the pay period ends on the last day of the December, the monthly snapshot and the yearly reports used for taxes needs to show that as a liability in December and then later an expense in January when paid.
I’m not sure there is a fourth option, but I’d be grateful for a hint if is there is one.