SYMPTOM:

A Company incurs expenses for paying salaries to its employees. Constraints will always be there on the amounts that can be spent against funds being allocated. Even after funds have been allocated against the HR entities, like departments, divisions, designations, or other different categories, you still need to determine the proportion or percentage of the fund that is required to be further allocated for paying the manpower (your employees). For example, even though you might allocate a certain fund for a particular department, the entire hundred percent of the amount may not be available to pay salaries for manpower. You need a feature to keep track of your expenses related to making payment of your employees.

RESOLUTION:

Your task consists of three broad activities in the following sequence:

TASK #1: Define the entities against which you would like to allocate funds.

TASK #2: Make entries to allocate the fund against the entities defined in Task #1.

TASK #3: Make entries to indicate the proportion or percentage of the fund allocated

TASK #4: Design a Report with the Document type as ‘Budget’, and run the Report to view the figures.

Process for TASK #1

You can keep track of expenses against:

1. Departments

2. Designations

3. Divisions or various

4. Categories

Therefore, from the menu bar, choose the Masters / Miscellaneous option. In case, you haven’t defined the department, division, etc. against which funds will be allocated, you must define them now.

Besides, employees should be tagged to these entities like department, division, etc. as applicable and their payroll must be generated. If an employee has Pay Structure(s) attached, you will not be able to specify these details from the main page of the Employee Master dialog (i.e., the page titled ‘Employee’). You will need to modify the structure attachment, and specify the attachments related to Division, Department, etc.

Process for TASK #2

Choose the option Masters / Budget / Funds Allocation from the menu bar. Choose the entity for which funds will be allocated from the drop down list named ‘Budget Allocation for’. For instance, choose ‘Department’ if you wish to keep track of your expenses department-wise. Accordingly, the System displays the existing departments on the grid at right hand side. Turn on the checkboxes against the Heads of Pay (HOP), such as, Net Salary, for which you would like keep track of the expenses. The grid, which displayed the allocation-heads, like all the departments, now, shows adjoining column(s) against all the selected HOP(s). Choose ‘Edit’. You can now specify the allocated amounts accordingly. Save your entries.

Process for TASK #3

Choose the option Masters / Budget / Manpower Allocation from the menu. Select an allocation Head from the drop down list. If you are maintaining the budget on the basis of departments, then automatically this list will show the existing departments in PERKS. The upper grid shows all employees, who are presently working under (or tagged to) the selected department.

Against the employee selected in the upper grid, specify the allocation percentage(s) in the lower grid. It is possible that the expense incurred to pay the Net Salary of a particular employee may be jointly allocated from the budgets under two different departments. For instance, 25% of his Net Salary may be allocated from the budget of the ‘Finance’ department, and the remaining 75% from the budget of the ‘Marketing’ department. However it is not mandatory to indicate a hundred percent allocation. In other words, you may just specify that 60% of someone’s Net Salary (or, any other HOP) is to be disbursed from the fund allocated for a particular department. It is always possible to save your entries without indicating where the remaining 40% will come from.

Process for TASK #4

We assume that you are conversant with PERKS’ Report Writer. You can define the design possibly in a myriad of different ways. An example has been mentioned underneath.

1. Group your design following your budget allocation Heads. For example, if you are maintaining budget department-wise, you should group the design on Department Code. If it is based on divisions, the design should be grouped on Division Code.

2. Make sure you are selecting 'total for a numeric field' at the Group Footer. Only then, will these options be enabled. For instance, if you want the allocated value of budget for Net Salary, select 'Total for a numeric field', select ‘Net Salary’ as the Head of Pay, and then, select 'Allocated value - Budget' as Type of value.

3. The option called 'Budget percentage' can also be selected in the same manner. The budget percentage will be calculated on the allocated amount (i.e., as per manpower allocations) versus total fund allocated (against the respective department or division, etc.).

You are not required to re-generate the payroll if all you need is to get updated figures after having modified the fund allocation amounts.

Besides, even if you are only interested about the figures displayed in the Group Footer, you should not keep the ‘Detail’ Section empty. To get the total on a numeric field (for all employees under a Group), you should, at least, insert the ‘Employee ID’ field in the ‘Detail’ section of the Report. If required, you can, however, ‘hide’ the ‘Detail’ section from Page Layout option.

For obtaining a fundamental idea on how to create a Report design using the Report Writer, we advise you to refer to the Online Help.