Critical Choices for Balance Dimensions and Contexts

Balances are critical for calculations for an employee for salary payment and statutory deductions such as tax and national insurance as well as any of the statutory payments They are used for payslips, RTI reporting to HMRC, payroll reporting.

Balances apply to the employee's entitlements and are used to determine eligibility into certain regulatory processes. For example, to check if an employee is eligible to be automatically enrolled for pensions, or for statutory payments for paternity or maternity pay.

Balance Dimensions During Balance Initialization

The Tax Year to Date global payroll dimensions are available with generic names that aren't meaningful to the UK payroll users. When selecting dimensions for a balance, use only those prefaced with GB in the Dimensions column for the balance initialization process.

The Period to Date dimensions are predefined and you must use their localized names if you want to initialize them. For example, to calculate average earnings for statutory payments (such as ShPP and SMP), where the values are imported from a legacy application to the payroll application.

You can use the Inception to Date balance dimensions if you want to initialize the balance values from the beginning of a time period. When initializing Inception to Date balances, the payroll referenced must exist in the previous year and have payroll periods defined for that previous year. This is because the process attempts to create a balance initialization in the previous year.

Contexts and Balance Dimensions During Initialization

When a balance is initialized with certain context values, the initialization value is included in the balance only if fetched within those context values. For example, Taxable Pay balance requires these context values:

• Calculation Breakdown ID

• Assignment Number

• Payroll Relationship Number

Once the balance are initialized with these context values, the application includes predefined dimensions that require only the context values in the initialized balance value. If you add a new dimension to this balance in future that requires a new context value, for example Aggregation Information, the initialized value isn't included in the balance. The dimension includes this initialized value. The dimension requires only one or more of the original contexts such as Relationship Tax Year to Date.

In the SMP NIC Compensation balance, only the Tax Unit Tax Year to Date dimension is currently attached. This requires the context values Payroll Relationship Number and Tax Reporting Unit. Eventually, you may want to attach the Relationship Tax Year to Date dimension which requires the Calculation Breakdown ID context. Even though Tax Unit Tax Year to Date dimension continues to include the initialized value, the new dimension Relationship Tax Year to Date value isn't included. This is because the initialized value wasn't stamped with Calculation Breakdown ID context value.