Intro: Perfect yet simple insight into all of your account data
In this introductory article we will talk about an integral part of Smartplan: “
Hours & Salary”, where you can check, edit and export your employees’ hours, absences and salaries
The „
Hours & Salary“ tab is the place where all your data in Smartplan comes together. Every little change regarding your employees shifts and hours is securely saved and documented here. It is extremely important in terms of reporting and analysis as well as when it comes to have reliable data for the monthly payroll accounting. It is also the place where you can correct certain data and make decisions regarding changes that your employees have requested.
So, as you can see, you really don’t want to miss out on getting acquainted with all the great functionality it has to offer. Let’s get right to it!
The “Hours & Salary” table explained
Let’s only focus on the upper part of “Hours & Salary” for a moment.
You decide, what data gets shown to you. To the left you choose the period of the data that you want to look at, to the right you can choose the rotas of which you want the data to be included.
When this is done, you will be presented with a table. On the horizontal rows you have got all users that have registered hours or absences during your chosen period. They are listed in alphabetical order. When it comes to the columns (vertically), some of them are always shown by default, others can by added by you optionally. Let’s go through them one by one:
- The “Planned hours” are based on the shifts that you created in your rotas. So, these are sort of the baseline of what we would expect the person to work according to the chosen rotas and time period. For your information, only the hours of published rotas are included here.
- Next are the total “Hours after changes” for your chosen period. Here we basically take the planned hours of the column to the left and subtract/add all the changes that were made. Possible changes to planned hours could be:
- A person was absent from work and his/her shift was marked as not attended by an Admin
- Someone worked longer than expected and corrected his attendance manually
Someone used the Smartplan Punch Clock to register his attendance during a shift
If all changes were registered in Smartplan correctly, the “hours after changes” should basically reflect the attendance of the employee during the period. This can then be used as a base for the payroll accounting, given that you pay this person by the hour.The fact that you can compare the planned and attended hours at a glance, can give you very powerful insights:- You can quickly identify who regularly works overtime and then dig deeper into the causes for this.
- You can identify general patterns of certain times or teams within your company that seem to be over- or understaffed.
- You can easily spot workers that are often being late for work.
- The column “Balance” is optional and can show you the time balance for each single employee. Meaning that you can easily spot here whether that person has worked more or less hours than were expected. How exactly this balance is calculated depends to some extent on your personal preferences, but most customers have set up a weekly or monthly hour target, that the attendance (see column before) is then compared to. More on this extensive function can be found in this manual collection: Time balances
In the “Salary” column (optional) you can get an estimate of the labor costs for your chosen time period. It is based on the “Hours after changes”, meaning attendance. The accuracy of Smartplan’s estimate significantly depends on that you have set up the salary function correctly and that all changes to the attendance were captured and documented within Smartplan. What’s great about the salary function is that you can look up periods in the future and get a prospect for what labor costs you might expect based on the shifts that are planned so far (“planned hours”).
Read more on how to set up the salary function right here: Set up salary types- Finally, the column to the far right shows you if your employees have made changes and whether these changes have been approved or not.
- When the field is empty, the employee has not undertaken any changes to his or her working times.
- When the field contains a red cross, the employee has made changes which have not yet been approved.
- When the field contains a green tick, the employee has made changes which have been checked and approved by an admin. It could also mean that an Admin has made changes to the attendance, which were then approved automatically.
Now you know about the main columns of the Hours & Salary table. But there is more. Sometimes it might not be sufficient for you to see these accumulated numbers. Maybe you want to investigate more thoroughly by looking at the shifts individually. That is possible. By clicking on the rows, you can expand the view and get more information on the individual shifts:
This is also where you can edit the attendance or approve changes to the attendance made by the employee. More on this topic in this article:
Correct attended hours
Export your data for further use
The table of the “Hours & Salary” tab is static, meaning that you can not customize how the data gets shown to you. If you want to focus on different aspects of the data or when you want to forward it to let’s say, your tax accountant, then it makes sense to make a file export.
To the left of the page, you can see two buttons, allowing to make an export of your employees’ hours or salary, respectively. By exporting your Smartplan data into a file, it becomes more manageable and can be prepared for further use, such as internal calculations or payroll accounting.
The
hour export is an Excel file, were your employees’ planned and attended hours, as well as absences and time balances are being listed based on different criteria. On the “Hours & Salary” page the data is purely listed by employees, but in the export file you will be able to review the data by job position or time of day, for example.
The
salary export is either an Excel or CSV file, that contains a detailed view of the calculations for your staffs payroll, based on the attendance that was registered in Smartplan. It also contains salary supplements or absence registrations (for situations such as sick pay), if that is something you have set up.
Want to learn more about how to export your workers’ hours? Click here:
Excel export /
Salary export