Salaried employees may occasionally need to be docked pay for absences that are taken without time off.
The workflow for entering a dock day is as follows:
- Enter attendance
- Import time off into a payroll run
- Review predicted docked pay and adjust if necessary
Enter attendance
Docked pay is calculated when an attendance entry (Human Resource > Employee Attendance/Time Off/Substitutes > Create Attendance) has an Absence Amount greater than the Time Off Amount.
In SchoolInsight Financials, the Absence Amount subtracts pay, and the Time Off Amount adds pay back. When the two are equal (e.g. an employee is absent for one day and uses one Sick Day), the employee’s pay does not change. However, if an employee is absent for one day but does not use a Sick Day or any other Time Off Type, the salary will be docked for the value of one day.
This is an example of an employee who should be docked one day of pay. Notice that the Time Off Type is left blank and the Time Off Amount is 0.
Pay will be docked any time the Absence Amount is greater than the Time Off Amount, even if the Time Off Amount is not 0. If the employee was absent for one day and used .5 sick days, she would be docked half a day of pay.
If in Illinois, see Leave of Absence vs Dock Day below to decide whether to check the “Unpaid Leave of Absence (board approved)” box.
Import time off
While going through the payroll process, you will need to import time off. All positions with regular pay must be added on the Employees tab of the register. Each of the employee’s positions will appear with a predicted amount of pay to dock.
Docked pay calculation
The formula for determining how much pay should be docked is applied to every position with a Salary or Simple Amount payroll item marked as regular pay.
ExcessAbsenceAmount is the Absence Amount minus Time Off Amount. If an employee was absent for three days but only had two Personal Days left, then the excess absence amount would be one day.
YearlySalary is the dollar amount on the Salary payroll item.
NumberOfWorkDays is determined by the work calendar assigned to the position. It is important to make sure this work calendar is accurate.
Example
To demonstrate, we can look at a sample employee who has two regular salaried positions and one yearly stipend. The “Special Education Director” position is on a work calendar with 250 days, and the “Teacher” position is on a work calendar with 180 days.
If the employee is docked for one day and didn’t use any time off, she will be docked one day. Below is the entry on the Time Off tab of the Payroll Register.
She is docked $30,000 / 250 days or $120 for the Special Education Director position.
She is docked $50,000 / 180 days or $277.78 for the Teacher position.
The Volleyball Coach position does not have any pay docked automatically because it is a stipend, not a salary. However, if she missed a day of volleyball practice, you can enter a number by which her stipend should be docked.
Leave of Absence vs Dock Day (IL)
In Illinois, TRS makes a distinction between board approved Unpaid Leave of Absence (like FMLA) and Dock Days which are days the employee misses after having run out of sick/personal leave. The system conveys this information to Gemini based on whether you check the “unpaid leave of absence (board approved)” box in the attendance page.
If a pay period has 10 days, and the employee is on an unpaid leave of absence for for 3 of those days, then the file would have:
- One row with payment reason Base Salary
- Days Paid = 7
- Earnings = whatever he/she was paid
- Docked Days = 0
- One row with payment reason Leave of Absence
- Days Paid = 3
- Earnings = 0
- Docked Days = 0
If a pay period has 10 days, and 3 days were docked days, then the file would have:
- One row with payment reason Base Salary
- Days Paid = 7
- Earnings = whatever he/she was paid
- Docked Days = 3
They are reported differently in the file sent to Gemini, but the immediate effect on the employee pay stub is the same. Either reporting method is going to show with the same docked pay label.