How do I capture daily paid employees?

By default, SimplePay doesn’t currently support the input of daily rates and days worked; however, you could create a custom income item with the Input Type “Custom rate * quantity”. The Hours worked factor should be the number of hours that your employees work in a day. You will also be able to set a Different rate for every employee by ticking the box.

More information about custom items can be found in this article:

Once the custom item has been created, it can be added to each payslip by clicking on Add (next to Regular Inputs), or in bulk by going to Employees > Bulk Actions > Regular Inputs, selecting it from the drop down menu and ticking Add for each employee. If you had ticked the box next to Different rate for every employee while creating the custom item, you would also have to enter the rate for every employee.

To enter the number of days, you could either click on the item’s name under Payslip Inputs for each employee or go to Employees > Bulk Actions > Payslip Inputs, select the item and enter the number of days.

Please note: when using this option, it is recommended to also set the employee(s) as hourly paid, which can be done from the Regular Hours or the Basic Salary screen, and capturing an hourly rate for them. This rate is used to calculate things like leave pay when leave is recorded for employees who do not earn a fixed salary.

  • For example, an employee who is paid R160 per day and works 8 hours a day, would have an hourly rate of 160 / 8 = R20 per hour.

An alternative to using a custom income item would be to treat your daily paid employees as hourly paid employees. This would also require you to calculate their hourly rate, as described above. Additionally, you would have to convert their number of days worked to an equivalent number of hours worked.

  • For example, if you have a daily paid employee whom you want to pay on a weekly basis, you would do the following calculation: number of days worked x number of hours worked per day. Therefore, if your employee worked 5 days in a particular week and 8 hours per day, you would enter 5 x 8 = 40 hours as their normal hours for that week.

More information about entering employee hours can be found in the following section: