51 Overview to Wage and Salary Administration

This chapter contains these topics:

51.1 Objectives

  • To understand the concepts of making pay changes

  • To make current or planned pay changes for an employee

  • To make current or planned pay changes for a group of employees

  • To learn how to apply the same pay change to a group of employees

  • To print an analysis of pay changes

51.2 About Wage and Salary Administration

To adequately budget for employee salaries, you must plan for employee pay changes and assess the financial impact of those changes on your salary budget. Typical types of pay changes include:

  • Merit increases

  • Cost of living adjustments

  • Regularly planned increases based on seniority changes

You can choose from a variety of methods for entering employee pay changes. In some cases, you might make a pay change, such as a merit increase, to an individual employee's record. You can enter changes that take effect in the next payroll cycle, or you can enter a future date on which a pay change becomes effective.

If your organization performs annual salary reviews for all employees at the same time, you typically need to enter pay changes for large groups of employees. In this case, you can analyze and review changes, and determine their impact on your financial budget, before you apply the changes to employee records.

To analyze and adjust pay changes before you apply those changes to employee records, you can create salary review groups. When you work with salary review groups, the system stores the information that you enter in a temporary worktable.

If you plan to make pay changes to groups of similar employees, such as all workers who are paid on an hourly basis, you can use a salary review group to apply a flat amount or percent increase to the entire group. You can organize similar employees into a review group and apply the changes to the group.

When you are satisfied with the pay changes, you can run a program that updates employee records with the information in the worktable.

For employees whose jobs are associated with pay grade steps, their pay rates are also associated with the pay grade step. To change an employee's pay, you must either advance the employee to the next pay grade step, or change the pay rate associated with pay grade steps. When you need to advance several employees to the next pay grade step, you can save time and reduce data entry by running a program to simultaneously advance a group of employees.

After you have finished entering proposed pay changes for a salary review group, you can print the Employee Salary Analysis report. Use this report to review employee's salary histories and proposed pay changes.

Wage and salary administration includes the following tasks:

  • Entering pay changes for individual employees

  • Working with salary review groups

  • Working with pay grade step administration

  • Reviewing the Employee Salary Analysis report