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Location Hierarchies, Custom Pay Centers and Custom Pay Details (Beta)

Ryan Fiedler
  • Updated
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Deputy offers a few key features for businesses with multiple sites or departments. It allows you to set up a location hierarchy to reflect your company's actual structure, making scheduling and reporting simpler across things like different stores or regions. Deputy also enables multi-pay centers, so you can group payroll by location or unit, which helps with accurate pay and reporting. Lastly, multi-agreement support is available for employees who have different employment agreements for different roles or locations, ensuring precise pay and cost tracking.

This article will show you how to set up and customize your payroll and pay details to fit your needs.

What are Locations, Pay Centers, Location Hierarchies?

A Location is any place where an employee can go to do work. It’s usually a place of work, but it does not always have to represent a physical space. 

A Pay Center(also known as a cost center) is a location or group of locations used for payroll purposes. By default, your business will be considered a single Pay Center for all locations.

You can create Location Hierarchies to match your business structure (for example, regions as parents and stores as children). This will allow you to decide which locations (parent locations, children locations, or both) will act as pay centres for payroll grouping.

Location Hierarchies

Setting up Location Hierarchies

In Deputy, you can assign a Parent location to any existing Location. 

To manage a Location's Parent:

  1. Head to the Locations tab and click Edit Settings on the location you want to manage.

  2. Under the General tab, scroll down and click to expand the Advanced location settings section. From the Parent location drop-down, you can:

    • Add a Parent location by choosing the relevant location from the list.
    • Remove a Parent location by clicking the None option

    Note: When finished, please make sure you click, Save.

Viewing the Location Hierarchy

To view your existing Location Hierarchy:

  1. Head to the Locations tab, and click the bar graph icon.

  2. Here you will be able to see a family tree style visual of your business location hierarchy:

  3. To adjust the visualisation you can:

    • Use the Show Departments tick box, to view all Areas underneath your Locations.

    • Filter by Status (Active or Archived) or if the Location is Pay center (Yes or no)

    • Display specific location using the Locations drop down.

Custom Pay Centers and Custom Pay Details

Custom Pay Centers are Locations or groups of Locations used for payroll purposes. This allows you to group different parts of your business into 'pay buckets' to control how different staff types are paid. You can create Pay Centers purely for pay grouping; they do not need workable areas.

Custom Pay Details allow you to set up different employment agreements for employees working in various roles within the same organization. For example, you may have a team member with two different employment contracts across two different stores within your business. 

To activate it, you must be logged in as a System Administrator or Advisor and follow the steps below:

Note: Enabling these features changes your account's data structure and is a one-way process. 

  1. You can access Business Settings from the drop-down menu under your name.

  2. On the Pay tab, you'll see toggles to "Enable pay centers" and "Enable multiple pay details per team member.” Set the desired settings to ON. A warning message will appear to confirm this change, as it cannot be reversed, and then click Save.

    Note: Pay centers must also be enabled to enable multi-agreements. 

    Note: Business Settings has a new look. These updates are being gradually rolled out and will soon be available in all Deputy accounts.
    Business Settings (classic) Business Settings

    (Click to Expand)

    (Click to Expand)

Turning a Location into a Pay Center

To assign a location as a Pay Center:

  1. Navigate to the Locations tab and click Edit Settings on the location you want to configure:
  1. Under the General tab, scroll down and click to expand the Advanced location settings section. You'll now see a toggle to make that location a Pay Center. Make sure to click Save.

 

Assigning Custom Pay Details to a team member

Once your pay centers are set up, you can edit to or assign pay details to an employee:

To access an employee profile:

  1. Head to the People tab, click the three dots next to the relevant employee profile, and click on the relevant employe profile.
  2. Select the Employment tab then click Edit.
  3. Under the Pay Details tab you can either Edit an existing pay detail or Add pay detail.
    • To Add pay detail add all necessary information and you can now assign the relevant pay center to this agreement to ensure that their pay flows through to the correct timesheet export. Click Add pay detail.
      Note: You still have access to all awards and custom pay rates.
    • To Edit a pay detail check all necessary information is correct and you can now assign the relevant Pay center to this agreement to ensure that their pay flows through to the correct timesheet export. Click Apply changes.
      Note: You still have access to all awards and custom pay rates.
  4. Under each Pay detail in the Locations section you can add or remove locations where this pay detail is applied:
    • To add, click Add locations, select the relevant location, and click Add locations (x).
    • To Remove, Hover over a location and click Remove, to remove a Location.
  5. To make sure these changes apply you much then click Save in the top right corner.

     

 

 

 

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