Position Category
A position category is the family a job belongs to: Direct Labour, Indirect Labour, Administration, Sales. One category covers many positions. It is how you talk about a whole class of jobs at once, and it is what the accounting side of payroll uses to decide which account a salary lands in.
What it is for
A grade says how senior a job is. A category says what kind of job it is. A Machine Operator and a Quality Inspector might sit at the same grade and still belong to different categories, because one is direct labour on the production line and the other is quality overhead.
The category matters more than it looks, because finance uses it. When payroll is posted to the general ledger, the posting profile decides which cost account a salary belongs in, and the position category is one of the things it can decide by. Direct labour goes to a production cost account, administration goes to an overhead account. Get the categories wrong and the payroll journal is wrong every month, in a way that is tedious to unpick.
So keep the category list short and make it match the way the client's cost accounting already thinks. Do not invent categories that have no accounting consequence, and do not create one per department, that is what Department is for.
Every field, in plain words
Position Category
| Field | What it means | What to put in it | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Position Category | The short code for the family. | DIRLAB | Required. Must be unique. |
| Name | The family written out. | Direct Labour | Required. Appears in lookups and on the payroll posting setup. Translations are kept per language. |
| Block | Retires a category you no longer use. | Leave clear. | Ticking it stops the category being offered on new records. Existing records keep it. |
How to configure it
- Ask finance how salary cost is currently split in the accounts. The answer is your category list, and it is usually four to six entries.
- Enter each one, for example
DIRLAB/Direct Labour,INDLAB/Indirect Labour,ADMIN/Administration,SALES/Sales and Marketing. - Save each one, leaving Block clear.
- Use the categories on Position Structure to declare which categories a position and grade may be combined with.
- Hand the list to whoever configures payroll posting, so the salary journal splits by the same families.
Scenarios
Finance wants factory wages and office salaries in separate cost accounts
That is exactly this screen. Create DIRLAB for the production floor and ADMIN for the office, make sure each position is assigned the right one through the employee's Organization Assignment, and the payroll posting setup can then route the two to different accounts.
Can we use the category instead of the department
No, and you should not try. A department is a unit on the organisation chart with a head and a budget. A category is an accounting family. A single department usually contains more than one category: the Production department holds operators who are direct labour and a storekeeper who is not.
What it is connected to
- Nothing has to exist before this screen.
- Position Structure names a category on each line, as part of declaring which job and level combinations are legal.
- Employee Organization Assignment carries the category onto the employee, and Employee Basic Information shows it.
- The payroll posting setup and the accounting integration read the category to decide which account salary cost is posted to. This is the connection that makes the screen worth getting right.
- Training Schedule can select nominees by category.
If something looks wrong
- "The payroll journal is posting factory wages to an overhead account" - the employees concerned have the wrong position category on their Organization Assignment, or the posting setup is routing that category to the wrong account.
- "It will not save, it says the category already exists" - the code is in use. Category codes must be unique.