Assign Optional Fields Field List
Optional Fields Structure and Default Values
About Optional Fields Assigned to Transactions
Optional Fields for Payroll Processing versus Transactions
About Optional Fields Translation from Payroll to General Ledger
Optional Fields allow you to customize your payroll system by letting you store an unlimited amount of additional information with employee, earning/deduction, and tax records, and with timecards, manual check transactions, and payroll processing.
Security
As with other payroll functions, you must be assigned the proper security permissions to set up, assign, edit, or delete optional fields, if security is turned on for your company database.
Setting Up and Using Optional Fields
Because you can select records by optional field code on several reports, optional fields also provide an additional means of analyzing employees and transactions in payroll.
If you use exactly the same optional fields in payroll and General Ledger, General Ledger will retain the optional field information used in transactions that you send from payroll.
You can use an unlimited number of optional fields in payroll. However, you must first define optional fields for your Sage HRMS Payroll system using the Optional Fields setup window.
After you have set up optional fields for your Sage HRMS Payroll system, you use the Payroll Optional Fields window in Payroll Setup to define optional fields for use with the following payroll records and transactions:
- Employee Payroll
- Employee Earnings/Deductions
- Employee Taxes
- Earnings/Deductions
- Taxes
- Timecards
- Timecard Earnings/Deductions
- Timecard Taxes
- Manual Checks Earnings/Deductions
- Manual Checks Taxes
- Transactions
- Transaction Earnings/Deductions
- Transaction Taxes
- Payroll Processing
The list above represents the specific areas of a record or transactions for which you can define optional fields. For example, you can define optional fields for the employee in general, for the employee’s earnings/deductions, or for the employee’s taxes.
You must specify the following:
- The type of optional field you are entering, indicating whether the optional field is to be used with specific payroll setup records (employees, earnings/deductions, taxes), timecard, manual checks, transactions, or payroll processing. You can set up an unlimited number of optional fields for each type.
- The optional field code for each optional field you are defining. Note that if you want to retain optional field information from payroll transactions when you create batches for General Ledger, you must use the same optional fields for transactions in payroll as you use in General Ledger.
- The default entry (value and description) to use for the optional field. However, the value entered here may be overridden by values entered elsewhere in payroll. You can accept or change the default values on any of the windows.
- Whether the program will display the optional field and its default entry on the window for the type of optional field when you set up new records or enter transactions.
For example, if you define Carpool as an optional field for employees and you select Yes in the Auto Insert field, the Carpool field will display automatically on the Optional Fields tab of the Employee Payroll window when you add a new employee.
- Settings that determine whether General Ledger accounts can be updated with optional field information from posted transactions.
You can set any of the optional fields to be Required fields. In the Optional Fields Setup window, double-click the Required column to toggle between Yes and No.
If you set an optional field as Required, be sure to enter a default value. Otherwise, an error message displays when you try to save the record.
After defining optional fields, you can assign them to particular records (employee, earnings/deductions, taxes), or when you enter timecards and manual checks.
The payroll program assigns the optional fields you define for payroll transactions when you generate transactions using the following windows:
- Calculate Payroll
- Process Manual Checks
Important! On the Assign Optional Fields window, setting the Auto Insert field for a transactional optional field to Yes means that the 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.
Assume your employees serve on various committees (a uniform committee, an employee education committee, and a community service committee) set up to address work related issues.
On the Optional Fields Setup window, you might set up an optional field called Committees, and in the Value column you would make three entries: Uniform, Education, and Community. For each entry, you could enter a 60 character description.
To ensure that users entered only one of those three values when assigning the Committees optional field to the employee record, you would select the Validate check box. (To allow users to enter any value, do not select it.) With the Validate box selected, you can also specify that users could leave the Committees field blank in the employee record, by selecting the Allow Blank option (available only for optional fields defined as text or date).
Then, on the Optional Fields window in Payroll Setup, when you set up the optional fields for employees, you would select Committees as one of the employees’ optional fields. You could then:
- Assign it a default value. If you selected the Validate option during Optional Fields setup, the default value must be Uniform, Education, or Community.
- Select the Auto Insert option if you want the Committees optional field to display automatically on the Employee Payroll window whenever you add employees.
After you have completed these steps, you can assign the Committees optional field when you set up each employee. If you had selected the Validate option during optional field setup, you ensure that the system validates your response at the Committees field in Employee Payroll. You can enter Uniform, Education, or Community (all three display in the Finder at the Committees field). If you had also selected the Allow Blank option, you can leave the field blank if the employee is not currently serving on a committee.
If you did not select the Validate option during Optional Field set up, you can make any entry you want up to the specified character length for the field at the Committees optional field in Employee Payroll.