The Yellow Team’s main client is a fiscal intermediary (FI) – one of their main purposes is to help people utilize state funds to pay employees who provide personal care assistance or other similar services. The FI helps these people manage paperwork, pay their staff, and other administrative functions the people may not be able to handle easily on their own.
Generally the rates that employees are paid for services are set in their clients’ service plans. These rates are stored in the system and pulled as appropriate to use to calculate the final amounts for payroll.
Sometimes, however, there is a need for a one-time or recurring payment or deduction that does not fall within the parameters set out by clients’ service plans. We have modified the system to apply custom rates as needed.
The most common scenario for this is payroll deductions – pre-established flat amounts or percentages of the gross, which will obviously vary depending on how much the employee has been paid during the relevant period. As part of the regular payroll process, the system will pull these custom rates or percentages and ensure that they are applied to the current timesheet(s).
Sometimes the FI is required to process one-time lump sum payments for various reasons, generally calculated as a certain percentage of total gross payroll paid over a period of several months. This is also accomplished with custom rates – the system will calculate the rates according to the relevant parameters and create payroll data for the team to process manually.
Generally there are validation rules which payroll data is checked against; most of these do not apply to custom-rate services, so the system has been modified to automatically exclude custom-rate services from validations moving forward. Normally when such validation rules are triggered, errors come up in the system that the team would need to deal with – if the validation rules are accurate, they can choose to delete or delay the timesheets, or they can approve them to be paid despite the validation error. Then if new custom-rate services need to be paid, the development team does not necessarily need to do any extra work to ensure that the validations don’t hinder the payroll team’s processing.
Over time we have worked with the FI to make our work and theirs more efficient. There is less need for manual workarounds or extensive work each time to ensure that any such payments are made successfully. Enhancing the system’s capability to handle these custom-rate services makes our lives easier and theirs – it leaves us more time to work on new features and leaves them working more efficiently when such services are required.
