An allowance must stop when a man goes on long leave

"We pay three thousand rupees a month to the men who come every day. Rizwan was on leave for two weeks in March and he still got it. It should stop the month he goes on leave."

What is really being asked

The client is paying an attendance allowance. He wants it to behave like one: earned by being at work, not by being on the payroll. Leave, however properly approved, is not attendance.

PeopleNest already works this way. The allowance is a rule on the Calendar, not a line on anybody's salary, and Payroll Attendance decides every period who earned it. If Rizwan was paid for March, the allowance was almost certainly set up as a recurring salary line instead, and that is the thing to undo.

There are two allowances, not one:

• Attendance Allowance - earned by a man who was on the payroll for the whole period and attended every scheduled working day of it. No absence, no leave.
• Perfect Attendance Allowance - everything above, and additionally no late, no early leaving and no half day.

A perfect month pays both lines. A man who was never absent but was late twice earns the first and not the second. That is the unslabbed calendar; once the calendar carries Allowance Slabs the grid is the only place conditions are written, and the clean period becomes one of its lines.

What you need in place first

• Calendar - the one the employees are attached to, with its Policy tab reachable.
• Wage Type - one wage type to carry the allowance onto the payslip. Create a second if you want the perfect-attendance line to show separately.
• Employee Policy Profile - every employee must be on a profile, and that profile is what names his calendar. A man on a profile with no calendar earns nothing here and reports nothing wrong.
• Payroll Attendance must be the thing that feeds payroll. If the client is paying allowances off a recurring salary line, this scenario does not apply until that line is removed.

Do this

1. Open Wage Type and create ATTALW, "Attendance Allowance", as an earning. Save it. It must not be blocked, because a blocked wage type pays nothing and leaves no message.

2. If the client wants the perfect-attendance bonus shown separately on the slip, create a second wage type PERFALW, "Perfect Attendance Allowance", the same way.

3. Open Calendar, pick the calendar the factory men are on, and go to the Policy tab.

4. Tick Attendance Allowance. Put 3000 in Attendance Allowance Amount and pick ATTALW in Attendance Allowance Wage Type. All three are needed. A ticked flag with a zero amount, or with no wage type, pays nothing.

5. If the client wants the second tier and this calendar has no Allowance Slabs, tick Perfect Attendance Allowance, put 1500 in Perfect Attendance Amount and pick PERFALW in Perfect Attendance Wage Type. If you are going to slab the calendar, leave these three alone and put the clean period in the grid instead - every ceiling 0, Payable % 100, PERFALW as the line's own Wage Type and 1500 as its own Amount. The screen refuses to save a slabbed calendar with the Perfect Attendance tick on, because the two would pay a clean month twice.

6. Save the Calendar. Repeat for every calendar whose people are entitled to the allowance. The office calendar can carry a different amount, or none at all, because the rule lives on the calendar and not on the company.

7. Run Payroll Attendance for the period as usual. When it saves, it writes one Employee Additional Payment Or Deduction document carrying a line per man who earned an allowance. You do not create that document, and you should not edit it.

8. Run Payroll and leave it unposted. Open a payslip for somebody with a clean month and check the allowance line is on it.

All or nothing, unless you slab it

Say this to the client before he discovers it himself.

• No tolerance by default. Leave the Allowance Slabs grid empty and one unexempted absence costs the whole allowance.
• Tolerance is a setting, not a change to the system. "One absence forgiven", or two lates at three quarters of the money, is the Allowance Slabs grid on the Calendar: each line is a set of ceilings - absences, leave days, lates, early outs, half days - and the percentage of the allowance a man who stayed inside all of them earns. Where two lines fit him the better paying one wins. Once a calendar carries slabs they govern the attendance allowance entirely, so a man who fits no line earns nothing rather than falling back on the old rule.
• Perfect attendance becomes a slab line. On a slabbed calendar the grid is the single place every condition is written, so a clean period is a line with every count 0, its own Wage Type and its own Amount. The Perfect Attendance fields above have to be switched off, and the screen says so rather than quietly paying a clean month twice.
• A part period does not qualify, slabs or no slabs. A man who joined on the 20th and came every day since does not earn a full month's allowance, and nor does a man who left on the 10th. He must have been on the payroll for the whole period. This is the one thing no setting changes.
• A weekend and a public holiday cost nothing, because nobody was scheduled to work them. A Public Holiday declared mid-period does not break anybody's streak.
• A day cleared by a released Exemption Request counts as present. This is the only way to forgive one bad day without losing the allowance, and it is deliberate: somebody has to sign for it.

Where two clients differ

	Factory calendar	Office calendar
Attendance Allowance	Ticked	Ticked
Attendance Allowance Amount	3000	1500
Perfect Attendance Allowance	Ticked	Not ticked
Perfect Attendance Amount	1500	-
What a man on leave for two weeks gets	Nothing	Nothing
What a man late twice but never absent gets	3,000	1,500
Allowance Slabs	empty	empty

The amount differs, the rule does not. Neither of these calendars is slabbed, so on both of them leave costs the whole allowance, and the Perfect Attendance fields are doing their job. A third client who wants a leave day tolerated at three quarters of the money gets there by putting lines in the Allowance Slabs grid - and on his calendar the Perfect Attendance tick comes off, with the clean period written as a line of its own.

How you prove it worked

1. Pick a man you know was on leave in the period. Open the Employee Additional Payment Or Deduction document that Payroll Attendance created and search the lines for his number. He must not be there.
2. Pick a man you know had a clean period. He must be there once, for 3,000. If the client also bought the perfect tier and that man was never late, he must be there twice.
3. Run Payroll unposted and compare the total of the allowance wage type against the count of clean men multiplied by 3,000. Those two numbers must agree exactly. There is no rounding and no proration to explain a difference.

What will go wrong

• The allowance was already a recurring salary line. Somebody set it up on Recurring Payments and Deductions years ago. Turn on the Calendar rule without removing that line and everybody is paid twice, the diligent men twice over and the absent men once. Remove the recurring line first.
• The wage type is blocked or deleted. The allowance quietly does not appear, with no error. The slip and the client's expectation disagree and nothing on screen says why.
• The employee's policy profile has no calendar. He can never earn the allowance, no matter how perfect his attendance. Check the profile, not the attendance.
• Payroll Attendance was re-saved after the payroll was made. It will refuse. Payroll has to be removed for the period before the attendance document can be changed, and the allowance document is rebuilt from scratch each time the attendance is saved. See a punch was wrong and payroll attendance is already made.