About Optional Fields Setup window
Optional Fields Structure and Default Values
Optional Fields for Payroll Processing versus Transactions
About Optional Fields Translation from Payroll to General Ledger
This section describes the optional fields defined for Transactions, Transaction Earnings/Deductions, and Transaction Taxes.
To provide additional information about paychecks, you can define these types of optional fields, using the Optional Fields window located in the Payroll Setup folder.
If you have defined the same optional field on the setup window and in other areas of the payroll program (that is, the employee record, or timecard), then the program uses the optional field from the other areas.
- For Calculate Payroll: Paycheck information that is generated based on a timecard, will use the optional field from that timecard, timecard’s earnings/deductions, or timecard’s taxes. Paycheck information that is generated based on the employee record, uses the optional field from that employee, employee’s earnings/deductions, or employee’s taxes.
For example, on the Optional Fields setup window, assume you have defined an Optional Field ABC for both the Transaction Earnings/Deductions, and for the Timecard Earnings/Deductions. Assume you created a timecard for the employee, and assigned the optional field ABC to the employee’s earning code. When you run Calculate Payroll to produce paychecks, the program uses the optional field ABC from the timecard.
Important! On the Optional Fields setup window, setting the Auto Insert field for a transactional optional field to Yes means that the payroll program will always add that optional field to the paycheck. This could inflate your database and slow down processing considerably. For example, if you set the Auto Insert field to Yes for an optional field for Transaction Earnings/Deductions, the optional field will be added to every earning/deduction on every paycheck. If you process weekly paychecks for hundreds of employees, this would result in a huge number of optional fields stored in your database.
A more efficient method is to set the optional field’s Auto Insert field to No. You can decide later whether to include the optional field in the paycheck information, by adding or deleting the optional field from the employee record, timecard.