Payroll Questions and Answers

Q: Can I have multiple tutors teaching, and being paid for the same session?

A: Yes, you can assign many tutors to a session. Each tutor is attached to the class with their own payroll type and rate, and this is the rate that will apply to them as they teach the session. Each tutor attached to the session will be paid their rate multiplied by their roster’s payable time, in the case of per timetabled hour pay rates.

If the tutors attached to the session have different payable times due to them i.e. only one of the tutors is paid an extra hour for opening and closing the venue, then use the tutor rostering feature to mark out each tutor’s correct starting and ending time’s as well as their correct payable duration.

Q: A tutor called in sick and was replaced by a casual. How can I reflect this so they are not paid for that class session?

A: You can either untick the tutor from the session, removing them from that session’s pay run, or by marking their tutor roster as 'Absent' if they couldn’t attend. Either option will prevent a per timetabled hour or per session payroll type being generated for them for that particular session.

You can then add the casual who filled in for them to the class and just assign them to that session and ensure the appropriate wage line is added to the budget for them (it’s best to untick the option 'add selected tutor to all class sessions' when you just want to add a casual replacement tutor to a single session)

Q: Our award requires the tutors to be paid for a minimum of two hours per session, but the session is only one and a half hours long. How can I pay them correctly?

A: The payable time field in the session on the timetable is the first option for overriding the pay, so you could increase this from the default session time of 1 hr 30 mins to the two hours you want the tutors to be paid. This would then show in the budget the correct costs for the tutors wage.

Q: Our award requires tutors to be paid an additional 20% of their normal hourly rate when they work 4 hours or less. How can I calculate this?

A: There are a few ways you could approach this change of rate.

One option would be two have two different roles which each had two different per timetabled hour rates e.g. Tutor Part Time, $40 per timetabled hour and Tutor Casual with a rate of $48 per timetabled hour. You would then choose the appropriate role and rate when you assign the tutor to the class, knowing it’s daily session duration and if they are being paid at the Part Time or Casual rate.

The second option is to use a single rate, but for the sessions with a 4 hour or less duration, to add 20% more time than the session duration to the session payable time. 20% of an hour of payable time is 12 minutes, so if they are working for 3 hrs, you could pay them the Part Time rate for 3 hrs and 36 min payable time to get 3 hours of payable time at the Casual rate.

Keeping in mind that a tutor in onCourse has a role and rate which applies to all of their sessions for that class, so using an increase in the payable hours is a good option if the session duration, and appropriate pay rate, varies during the class. For example if the first 9 sessions of the class are 6 hours long, so the tutor is paid at the Part Time rate, but the last session is an exam and only 3 hours long, so the tutor should is paid at the higher per hour Casual rate for this session only. This is where changing the payable time to 3 hrs and 36 mins would be most appropriate.

A final option, if trying to calculate the difference in payable time to arrive at the new rate is too complicated, is to add a second wage line to the budget for that tutor for a fixed rate of the extra amount they should be paid. In this example, for the final 3 hour exam session, the tutor would be paid an additional $32 on top of their normal hourly rate. Remember that if you choose this option, the fixed amount will show up in the payroll run for the first class session, as all fixed rate types are payable on class commencement. You can use the untick option for that line in the payslip to remove it on every payslip generated until the pay run when you want it to be paid, but this requires a little more manual intervention.

Q: Our tutors are paid a fixed daily rate when they work between 6 and 8 hours. How can I set this up?

A: onCourse does not have a concept of a daily rate. A per session rate may be an appropriate way to express this provided your class timetable has only one session per day.

If single day in the class timetable is often broken into multiple sessions, expressing the daily rate as a per timetabled hour rate would be more appropriate. For example, if the daily rate was $300, you may choose to express this as a per timetabled hour rate of $50 per hour, and you would then ensure all classes with a daily duration between 6 and 8 hours have the payable time per day set to 6 hours.

If your teaching day started at 9am, finished at 4pm and the day was broken into 3 x 2 hour sessions with gaps between them for breaks, the default payable time would be the same as the session time, so you wouldn’t need to alter anything and the daily rate would be calculated correctly.

If your teaching day started at 9am and finished at 5pm with a single session having an 8 hr duration, you could adjust the payable time to 6 hrs so the daily rate would calculate correctly.