Contract Manipulation Rules

Contract manipulation rules are a powerful set of rules that can be employed to update a staff member’s paid or worked hours based on a range of filters.

Create the rules under Pay > Contracts > Manipulation Rules. When editing or adding a new rule, you will be presented with a series of filters that you can use to tell StaffSavvy when to apply the rule. These can be between specific times, days, national or organisation holidays, when working so many days a week or when working over a number of hours.

Once the rule has been reached, you can tell the system to manipulate the paid and/or any hours deducted from the staff members' contracted hours. For example, you can configure the rule to pay double time on bank holidays automatically; there are many possibilities.

The system will still maintain the actual hours worked and use these for contract limits and rules; the hours paid will be adjusted.

When a rule is in effect, a breakdown of the rules will be shown on both the shift details and the time entry details pages.

Shift budgets will also consider any of the contract rules so that the predicted cost of a shift will be correct.

Sub Rules

You can now add ‘sub rules’ to your Contract Manipulation rules. When creating a Sub Rule, you can ‘Stop Further Rules, ' allowing this sub-rule to override all other rules when triggered. You can add a Sub Rule under Pay > Contracts > Manipulation Rules, and then next to ‘edit rule’, you should see a button allowing you to add a sub rule. Then, it will ask you whether you want to add a new contract rule, so click this button to get started. These can be utilised to allow you to be more specific about breaks and pay rates for breaks when certain hours are worked. 

These are used to run a set of rules separately from all others. For example, if you introduce an overtime pay rule that stops all other rules, but you still need to add rules that pertain to overtime, a sub-rule is a great way of keeping a set of interlinked rules running while stopping the rest.

Stop Further Rules?

When creating a new rule, you can specify whether you want to stop all other rules when this specific rule applies. This means that certain rules will have higher priority over others when enabled. 

This is useful as a fail-safe for specific times when you need to override a rule, i.e. if a staff member has worked too many hours. 

It is worth noting that ‘Stop Further Rules’ will not include the Sub Rules set up for this rule.

Apply when

Once you have established any sub-rules, you can decide what events will trigger the manipulation rule to be enacted. 

There are a series of general options here that need to be configured, including:

• Apply Between - Only apply the rules between these times. Set both times to midnight if you wish the rule always to apply.
• Apply to Skills - You can select exactly which Skills or Roles you want this rule to apply to.
• Apply on shifts at Venue - You can also specify whether you want shift rules to apply to a specific venue or venue group.
• Apply on Days - select which days of the week the rule applies to.
• National/Company Holidays? - Does the rule apply over holidays, or should the system ignore holidays?
• Minimum Length of Service - How long must a staff member work here before this rule applies?

Apply on hours worked

You have a variety of options for when this rule will be applied based on the following categories; 

• When working above a certain amount of hours
• When working below a certain amount of hours
• When working X days in a week
• When working X days in their contract period
• When working X number of hours in a row

Apply based on missed rest

You can now be even more specific about when the rule applies based on the rest period between shifts, i.e. if there hasn't been a rest period of at least a certain amount of hours after working a certain amount of hours in a row.

Contract Date Sets

Choose only to enact this rule if the dates are within a holiday block. You can also specify which holiday block you want this to come under. Date sets allow you to set date ranges when certain rules, expected hours or limits do or do not apply.

Additional Filter Options

There are also several other, more specific options to apply that relate to whether or not the rule will be implemented, depending on the shift.

• Apply to a Whole or Partial Shift - This option allows you to limit how a rule will apply to shifts that only partially match the filters set up. For example, a shift might start at 9 pm on a bank holiday and go on to a regular working day. Here you can specify if the rule applies to the whole shift, regardless, or applies to the part of the shift that matches up exactly, or the shift must all match up with the rule or will not be applied.
  
  
• Minimum Paid Length - For minimum paid hours rules, you can choose if the system should look at all hours worked back to back or just the hours worked under the selected roles/skills for that rule.
  This allows you to treat certain types of shifts as independent from all other work for the purposes of minimum paid time. For example, a staff member might be paid a minimum of 3 hours for assisting with production load out at the end of a full day of work. This change will allow you to always pay them for 3 hours for that load out, even if they have also previously worked 10 hours in a row.
  
  
• Calculate Working Times - You can also set whether to calculate hours based on the Default Contracted Hours (excluding breaks but including manipulation rules). Another option is to use the raw working hours, which are Worked Hours (excluding breaks and manipulation rules). The final option is Raw Paid Hours. Raw Paid hours will not take into account manipulation rules, but will take into account paid breaks.
  
  
• Apply on - The final manipulation filter allows you to apply this on normal worked time entries, holiday entries, absence time entries, or a combination of the above. This allows you to pay holiday hours as though they were working time.

Changes to Make

This section outlines the action of the 'rule'. A rule can have more than one action, and below, we will specify your action options for a rule. 

Multiplying Pay

Multiplying pay options allows pay to be increased if certain specifications are met. 

• Multiply Hours Paid By
  This will increase the hours to be paid. The actual hours worked will not be affected.
  Multiply Contracted Hours Worked By
  This will increase the hours worked as part of a staff member's contracted hours. It won't affect hours worked for restrictions or required breaks. Use this to reduce the number of hours a staff member must work under their contract if they work specific hours/days.
• Multiply Hourly Rate By
  This will multiply the hourly rate. The actual hours worked and the pay element used will not be affected.
• Minimum Paid Length
  This will increase the hours to be paid. The actual hours worked will not be affected.

Changes to time entries

You can also apply a rule so that if the staff member doesn’t meet a specific condition, their pay rate or Skill will change. An example of this might be that if a staff member doesn’t get an 11-hour break after working 8 hours or more, their shifts are paid double the time until they receive their break. This can be added under the ‘changes to make’ section, where you can add the financial changes you want to make to your rule. 

• Change Pay Element - This option will forcibly change the pay rate for the affected part of the time entry. You must select the pay element they would receive once the rule's requirements have been met, i.e., double time pay.
• Change Skill - This option forcibly changes the skill for the affected part of the time entry. Once the rule requirement has been met, a staff member will be marked under this Skill instead of their assigned one.  

Additions

With Additions, you can increase hourly rates or introduce multiple paid hours if a staff member doesn’t meet the rule requirement, such as receiving a break during their shift. There are two types of additions.

• Add additional time entry - This will add a mirrored time entry for the duration with a different pay element. This is the only way time entries overlap and is designed for additional payments on top of the original time entry.
• Add additional pay item - This will add a pay item when the time entry matches the criteria.

The final configuration option is to select which Contracts will be affected by this.