Not sure which award to apply to staff, or what classification level to assign?
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This guide explains how to classify staff under a Tanda Modern Award template. You will require the Admin permission level to follow the steps in this guide. Prior to classifying employees you will need to activate a Tanda Modern Award template.
You can classify employees under a Tanda modern award template individually on the employee profile, or you can bulk classify multiple employees using the bulk classification tool.
What this help guide covers:
Individually assigning award classifications
To assign an award classification to an individual employee, follow the below steps:
Navigate to Workforce > Staff and select the employee you want to classify
On the left side menu, click Pay Conditions
Click the Edit These Conditions or Add New Conditions button
Select when the changes should begin applying
Configure the Industry award, Employment type, Classification/level, as well as any Allowances or Additional tags
(Optional) If Positions have been configured in your account, these can also be used to apply award classifications.
Select if the employee should receive a contract or document with this change
Click Confirm Changes, review the changes, and then click Confirm and Apply
Further tips on classifying employees:
If you followed the above steps, but rates don't appear yet, check that the date of birth is entered. The date of birth is used to determine if a junior or adult rate should apply
To view which rules apply to an employee after an employee is classified, click Award Rules button on the left side of an employee profile
Positions
Where positions have already been created and assigned to staff those employee setups can be edited in bulk by editing the position. Theses changes will automatically apply to staff - a confirmation email will be sent to confirm staff pay conditions have been updated.
You can read more about configuring and editing positions here.
Bulk assigning award classifications
To bulk assign award classifications to staff, follow the below steps:
Navigate to Compliance > Award Template and click Manage on the relevant template
Select Add Staff to Award
Select the Award for each employee, or for employees not covered by an award, select Custom Payroll Setup. When you have assigned either an award or custom payroll setup to each employee, click Select Awards at the bottom of the page to move to the next step.
Select the Employment Type and Classification/Level for each employee covered by the award. Note: if all staff are already assigned an employment type and classification, this step will be skipped automatically.
Assigning custom award rules
To configure the employee, select Custom Payroll Setup and then select the Tag or Tags that apply to them.
Other employee profile payroll fields
Payroll ID
Some payroll systems use a Payroll ID as the unique identifier for employees. Entering a payroll ID will help to match records between systems.
Tanda uses email, phone number, employee ID and name to match the correct users when importing staff information, so this field is not mandatory in Tanda for all payroll systems, but if it is required in your payroll software, it's a good idea to have it in Tanda also.
Date of Birth and Employment Start Date
Employment start date will automatically apply the date you import an employee profile, but you can override that date. Date of birth is used to apply base hourly rates based on age.
Annual Salary
Enter the full annual salary into the salary field. You can decide how you want salary costs to calculate in your account general settings here.
Public Holidays
Confirms the Public Holiday settings applied to the employee. For further information on setting up public holidays in your account, see Configure public holiday dates.
Advanced Payroll Fields
Some payroll classifications payroll fields are turned off by default. These can be enabled by activating advanced payroll fields through Settings > Feature Management. Advanced payroll fields include:
Paid at Adult Rates: Tick this if you would like Tanda to disregard the age of the staff member and pay them adult rates
Part Time Fixed Hours: if your staff member is part time, this is where you enter what their contracted hours are, either weekly or fortnightly. That way, the system knows when to calculate overtime
Expected hours in a week: enter expected hours for salaried staff, to cost their hours on timesheets and reports. This can also be configured in Salary Settings.
Overtime averaging period: if you are set up for a weekly pay (for example), but you have a staff member whose overtime is calculated fortnightly
Period start date: this field determines the period start date for overtime calculation. If you use overtime averaging, this sets the start date of the overtime averaging period
FAQ's and Troubleshooting
How are salaries calculated?
There are a few options for how you can apply salary costs in Tanda. To change the method of salary cost allocation, navigate to Settings > All Settings > View all general settings > Salary allocation.
Hourly Rate
The split evenly by hourly rate salary allocation method divides the weekly salary by the Contracted Weekly Hours in the employee's profile (or rostered hours if none exists). This creates an effective hourly rate for the week, which is applied for each hour the employee works up until the employee has worked the total rostered hours or expected hours for the period.
If the employee works more than their expected hours, however, the hourly rate will adjust so that the cost for that week doesn't exceed their salary.
This means that if the employee's Contracted Weekly Hours are set to 38, the hourly rate will be calculated with this value. If the employee works less than the 38 contracted hours, for example, the remainder will have to be added through either Leave Requests, or a Minimum Week Length rule.
These leave requests would be added by going to "Leave -> Leave requests -> New Leave Request" and adding in the remaining time.
The Minimum Week Length rule would be added by creating a new rule (if you have not made Custom Award Rules before, try reading our Compliance help article). This rule would be created by tagging the rule to your salaried staff, inputting the Minimum hours employees should be paid per week condition within the Minimum Shift Length setting, and allocating the correct multiplier. Screenshots of this are attached at the bottom of this document.
Split evenly by hourly rate example
Split evenly by hourly rate example
An employee on $52,000 a year will be paid $1,000.00 a week, where if the employee's worked hours and contracted weekly hours are the same (in this case 38) their timesheet will show a correctly costed period of $1,000.00.
If they worked 40 hours (more than contracted), their Salary cost would update on a pro-rata basis, where the base rate would change to ensure the final pay period cost is correct:
To pay the employee extra for working more than their contracted hours, you may want to use the hourly rate enhanced method.
If they worked 30 hours (less than contracted), their Salary cost will still rely on the usual hourly rate, meaning this missing time would have to be topped up.
To solve this issue, you can either:
Enter Leave:
Add Minimum Week Length Rule:
Hourly Rate Enhanced
The split evenly by hourly rate enhanced salary allocation method allows overtime to be costed more easily for salaried staff, when compared to the standard hourly rate method.
It works similarly in that it divides the weekly salary by the Contracted Weekly Hours in the employee's profile to determine an hourly rate for the week, however, when an employee exceeds their contracted hours, the hourly rate can remain as-is to calculate an overtime cost.
Rather than adjusting the hourly rate based on the total number of hours worked within a week, the hourly rate is based on the total number of ordinary hours in a week, when the contracted hours have been exceeded.
Split evenly by hourly rate enhanced example
Split evenly by hourly rate enhanced example
An employee is contracted for 38 hours/week, and is on a $52,000/year salary. They earn $1000/week on this salary. Their standard hourly rate is therefore $26.3158.
I want to pay overtime whenever this employee works more than 38 hours, at their standard hourly rate.
To configure this, I could do so by following the steps below:
Ensure the Salaried Staff salary allocation method is set to 'Split using an hourly rate enhanced'.
Ensure my employee has both a Salary and Contracted Weekly Hours set in their current Pay Conditions
Create a custom Salaried Overtime rule that applies after 38 hours are worked in an overtime period. The rule should be configured as 'Overtime Hours':
Once this rule has been set up, the timesheet is costed as below, with the overtime rule costed in addition to the $1000 that the employee earns per week:
Below is an example of how the timesheet would be costed if the rule were not configured as 'Overtime hours':
Below is an example of how the timesheet would be costed if the salary allocation method were configured as the standard 'hourly rate' method:
Rostered Days
The split evenly by rostered days salary allocation method divides the weekly salary by the number of shifts on the roster to arrive at a flat cost per worked shift. This calculation includes all rostered shifts for a particular employee, including published and unpublished shifts. Once the number of rostered shifts has been worked, adding up to the employee's total salary, no further costs are added for additional shifts.
Split evenly by rostered days example
Split evenly by rostered days example
In the below example, an employee earning $1000 a week is rostered for two days, but works 3 days that week.
In the below example, on Wednesday the 5th and Thursday the 6th, there is a $500 cost because the employee has been rostered for only those two days in the week, and it's split the full salary between those two days ($1000/2 = $500):
On Friday the 7th, the employee was not rostered, so there is no cost associated with that shift. As long as the employee works each day they are rostered though, the timesheet will pull the pull salary amount.
Why is the timesheet cost for a salaried employee less than the employees salary for a period?
If using the split evenly by rostered days salary allocation method, this means the number of worked shifts is less than the number of rostered shifts. This signals that either (a) there is an additional shift on the roster which shouldn't be there, or (b) the employee didn't attend one of their rostered shifts. Removing the additional shift, or applying leave for the day not worked will bring the timesheet cost in-line with the employees salary for the period.
If using the split by hourly rate salary allocation method, this means the total number of hours of worked time + leave on the timesheet adds up to be less than the expected hours or rostered hours (depending on which is greater) for the period. If an employee is engaged to work an expected number of hours in a period, and works less than those hours, the difference is typically made up of paid or unpaid leave.