TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction and Features

How do I get started?

1. Employer Details

2. Payroll Setup

3. Employee Biodata and Pay Setup

i. Biodata

ii. Pay Setup

iii. Allowances

iv. Deductions

v. Notes

4. Public Holidays

5. Foreign Workers Levy

6. Accpac Settings

7. Types of Leave

8. Job Costing

9. Bank Codes

Time Cards and Leave

1. Time Cards

2. Leave

How do I generate a new payroll?

How do I modify/cancel/commit a new payroll?

Demo Version

Upgrades

## Introduction and Features

· RCS Simple Payroll’s design philosophy is to keep things as simple and intuitive as possible.

· RCS Simple Payroll is completely designed from the bottom up for the Singaporean market. It is not a product designed for other markets and then ‘customised’ for Singapore.

· RCS Simple Payroll is an off-the-shelf product. You install it and run it – it does not require customisation (although see the point below about multi-user).

· RCS Simple Payroll can run as single-user and multi-user. However, it is only optimised for single-user usage. The database can be secured by a single password. If you wish to run it as multi-user with a set up of different users with their own passwords and levels of access then customisation is required.

· Import Employee Biodata. If your employee biodata details already exist in another payroll programme, spreadsheet, database etc then it should be possible to import.

· Unlimited number of employees allowed.

· Payroll Frequency. Employees can be paid weekly, fortnightly or monthly. You may have a mixture of weekly, fortnightly and monthly paid employees.

· Hourly-Rated or Monthly Salaried. You may have a mixture of hourly-rated and monthly salaried employees.

· Import Time Card data. Clocking-in and clocking-out times for computation of ordinary hours and overtime hours may be imported from a text or Excel file. Up to 3 clocking-in and clocking-out times per employee per day may be imported.

· Varying Working Week. Employees can be on 5 days, 5.5 days or 6 days week.

· Easy Rollback of New Payrolls. Generate a new payroll and adjust figures as you wish. If you are not happy with the payroll, easily cancel it and generate again after changing various input details.

· CPF, Self-Help Groups, FWL and SDL calculations. RCS Simple Payroll will automatically compute Central Provident Fund contributions. In the case of PRs, system will taken into account year of PR. In the case of foreign workers, system will automatically compute Foreign Workers Levy. To simplify data-entry, there is one screen for CPF-Payable allowances and one for CPF-Not Payable with the allowances all spelt out for clarity. System will also calculate Additional Wages Ceiling and at year-end calculate whether there has been an over- /under- payment of CPF where total wages exceed $100k.

· IR8As. RCS Simple Payroll will compute totals distinguishing between Ordinary and Additional Wages and Gross Pay and Net Pay in order to automatically generate IR8As and assist in manually completing CPF Returns.

· Leave calculations. Standard variety of leave types such as annual, medical, unpaid, compassionate, maternity and marriage. Computing leave automatically takes into consideration the length of the employee’s working week and any public holidays. When an employee leaves, system will calculate any no leave pay due.

· Generate GL Distribution for export to Accpac for DOS.

· Job Costing. Follows Accpac for DOS’s fields of Job Number, Job Phase and Job Category.

· Useful tools. RCS Simple Payroll has various calculators which you can use ‘outside’ of a generated payroll so that you can perform what-if analyses. These tools include CPF Calculator (so you can experiment with different wages etc), Working Days Calculator (so that you can calculate the working days between two dates taking into account public holidays and length of working week), Calculator (a normal maths calculator) and an online copy of CPF Employers Handbook for ease of reference. top

## How do I get started?

Overview: You need to setup various payroll options such as starting year, starting month, frequency of payroll etc. Then you enter, or import, employee biodata such as name, NRIC, race etc, along with pay details such as hourly-paid or monthly salaried. Once these parameters are established, you may generate new payrolls.

You examine each employee record in the new payroll and modify various items, such as reading in time card hours or unpaid leave taken. If you are happy with the resulting calculations, you print Pay Slips / Salary Vouchers and any necessary reports and then commit the New Payroll. [Top]

####

### 1. Main Menu/Setup Employer Details

Need to enter employer details such as Tax Ref and Address.

If you wish to export payroll data to the IBG.TXT file for subsequent processing and submission to a bank, then you also need to fill in the employer’s bank details.

The employer details of name etc will be reproduced in various reports, eg IR8A. [Top]

### 2. Main Menu/Setup Payroll Setup

Overview: Payroll frequency can be weekly, fortnightly or monthly. You refer to each payroll regardless of actual date as:-

Weekly: Year, Month, Week (1/2/3/4)

Fortnightly: Year, Month, Week (2/4)

Monthly: Year, Month, Week 4

First Month of Payroll. You must enter this first month in order to activate the programme, eg your first payroll may be during the year such as in May. Once chosen, it cannot be changed. The actual payroll calendar runs from January to December consistent with the IR8A.

Change the Year. This would normally be used only at year-end. Note that the logic of the software relies upon the payroll year (current payroll date) rather than the system clock of your computer. For example, if you run a YTD analysis the software will look at the payroll date rather than the date on your computer if these two dates are different.

Default Weekly Ordinary Hours. By default, this is 44. When you generate a new payroll, if there are no Time Card data then you will be prompted as to whether you want for any hourly-rated employees to have their ordinary hours automatically computed according to this default. You may manually edit the ordinary hours of individual employees. Therefore, if the payroll frequency of the employee is fortnightly then the automatically computed ordinary hours will be 88. If the payroll frequency of the employee is monthly then the figure will be 176.

Based upon the ordinary hours, the ordinary hours amount component of hourly-rated employees’ wages are computed. Although ordinary hours can be kept in respect of salaried employees for record-keeping purposes, their salaries are not computed from ordinary hours (actually computed from monthly salary figure).

Default Ordinary Hours Mondays to Fridays. Standard setting of 8 hours.

Default Ordinary Hours Saturdays. Standard setting of 4 hours.

Default Overtime Hours. Setting is all Sunday is counted as OT.

Default Starting Times. This is used with time card data to compute the number of times an employee is late reporting for work. The number of times late is printed on the pay slip.

Choose Payroll Frequency. Can have weekly, fortnightly or monthly payrolls. This setting is a default for the system. You may edit individual employees to distinguish between those weekly, fortnightly and monthly paid, for example hourly-rated employees, such as foreign workers, may be weekly or fortnightly paid. These settings, at the system and employee levels, may be changed at any time.

Default Day(s) for Payrolls. If you select payroll frequency of weekly then the default values are 7th, 14th, 21st and 28th of the month; for fortnightly then the default values are 14th and 28th of the month; for monthly then the default value is 28th of the moth. You may change the actual day during the generation of a new payroll.

Default Weeking Work. Default value is 5 days week. May also choose 5 ½ days week and 6 days week. You may edit individual employee records to give a different weeking work, and so have a mix of working weeks in the payroll.

Live Payroll. Based upon the above default settings, the live payroll section displays the details of the current payroll. You may manually advance these to future payrolls but that is not recommended (allow the system to determine what is the next payroll subject to your default settings). [Top]

### 3. Main Menu/Setup Employee Biodata and Pay Setup

This is where you enter employee biodata such as name, date of birth, address etc and the pay setup details such as salaried or hourly-rated, frequency of payment etc.

Note that you cannot generate a payroll transaction for an employee until he/she has biodata and pay setup details. You cannot generate a new payroll and then decide to add a new employee at that stage. You must create all your employees with their corresponding biodata and pay setup details before generating a new payroll.

This form consists of six tabbed pages:

i. Biodata

This page contains the following :

ID field – This value is the unique identifier for the employee. Enter the employee’s NRIC, or Passport No., or WP No. etc as appropriate. Note that this identifier will be reproduced in the IR8A. This field is compulsory and must be unique. The system will not allow you to save a duplicate number.

Employee Number field – for record-keeping and sorting purposes. The system relies upon the ID field (see above) for identifying employees.

Last Name and First Name(s) fields - Last Name field is compulsory, whilst First Name(s) field is optional.

Address fields - Optional, but recommended you fill it in – especially if you want it to produce mailing labels.

Nationality field - It is used to determine whether employee comes within the CPF or FWL scheme. Choices are ‘S’ (Singaporean), ‘PR’ (Permanent Resident), ‘FR’ (Foreigner) and ‘FC’ (Foreigner with CPF). ‘S’, ‘PR’ and ‘FC’ will subsequently activate CPF fields in the payroll programme, whilst ‘FR’ will activate FWL. Default is ‘S’.

When PR field - If you select ‘PR’ for Nationality then the When PR field becomes activated. You must complete this as a PR’s CPF contribution rate is partly determined by when they became PR. The system will automatically calculate PR Year.

Date of Birth field - It is used to determine which age-related CPF contribution rates the employee falls into. The system will automatically calculate the employee’s age.

Sex field - Some allowances such as Maternity Allowance are only available for female employees.

Race field – It is used to determine which self-help group an employee should contribute to. Choices are ‘C’ (Chinese), ‘M’ (Malay), ‘I’ (Indian), ‘E’ (Eurasian) and ‘O’ (Other). Default is ‘C’.

Marital field - Used to complete IR8A. Choices are ‘S’ (Single) and ‘M’ (Married). Default is ‘S’. [Top]

ii. Pay Setup

The logic of this page, and the Allowances and Deductions pages, is that you enter default amounts for your individual employees. Then, when new payrolls are generated these default amounts are reproduced in the new pending payrolls. You can accept or modify the amounts in the new pending payrolls.

For most monetary fields, you should enter MONTHLY figures. If the employee is weekly paid or fortnightly paid then the new payroll generation process will pro-rate these figures automatically, eg for a salaried person whose payment frequency is fortnightly enter the monthly gross salary and the system will half this when calculating this at each fortnightly payroll run.

This page contains the following :

Position field - Reproduced on IR8A.

Commenced/Left fields - New payrolls are generated for employees who have pay setup details and either who have not left or left during the current month.

Calc Payment for Outstanding Leave - When you enter a leaving date, the command button ‘Calc Payment for Outstanding Leave’ becomes available. Clicking this button will determine length of service of employee, pro-rated entitlement to leave for current payroll year, actual leave taken and any outstanding leave. It will prompt you if you then wish to calculate any actual payment due to the employee and whether you want to transfer that payment to the pending payroll.

Department field – for record-keeping and sorting purposes.

Full-/Part-time fields – for record-keeping and sorting purposes.

OT Payable field – to flag that employee is eligible for overtime. Overtime fields in the New Payroll form are activated for the employee if this field is checked. If this field is not checked however, once a new payroll is generated it is possible to activate overtime fields in the New Payroll form by checking a similar field there.

Pay Type field – To distinguish between Hourly-Rated and Monthly Salaried employees. Default is Salaried.

Working Week field – Used to compute number of working days when an employee takes leave. Default is 5 day week.

Payment Frequency field – Used to determine which employees are paid weekly, fortnightly and monthly. Can have a mixture of employees with differing payment frequencies, so that some are paid weekly, some fortnightly and some monthly.

Gross Monthly Salary field – This field is only enabled if the Pay Type field is Salaried.

Daily Rate/ Hourly Rate fields – For monthly salaried employees, these fields are computed automatically after a figure in entered in the Gross Monthly Salary field. Daily Rate is computed as Gross Monthly Salary / 22 days whilst Hourly Rate is computed as Gross Monthly Salary / 176 hours. For hourly-rated employees, you have to manually enter a figure in the Daily Rate field. Hourly Rate will then be computed as Daily Rate / 8 hours. These automatic calculations may be manually overwritten.

Foreign Workers Levy Code field – This field is only enabled for employees whose Nationality field is set to ‘FR’. A combo box appears from which you can choose the appropriate code and corresponding monthly and daily rates. For employees whose Nationality field is set to ‘S’ or ‘PR’ then instead of the combo box a label appears saying ‘Foreign Workers Levy not applicable’.

Bonus Months field - Enter the number of bonus months you wish to give the employee. Do not include AWS in this. When you generate the payroll, you have to manually indicate at that stage whether you wish to compute Bonus and AWS payments. In other words, entering bonus months here does not mean that a bonus will be generated in the next payroll; it will only be generated when you explicitly say so.

Directors Fee field - This would normally be a regular (that is, monthly) payment to directors. When you generate a new payroll, you can manually edit the amount for that particular month. If you pay Directors Fee say just once a year then leave this field blank, and manually edit the amount in the new payroll as appropriate.

Annual- / Medical - Leave Entitlement fields – Enter the respective values for employees.

Job Number, Phase, Category fields – For job costing. These fields follow the format of Accpac for DOS. [Top]

iii. Allowances (CPF) and Allowances (Non-CPF) Tabbed Pages

The logic of these pages is that you enter default amounts for your individual employees. Then, when new payrolls are generated these default amounts are reproduced in the new pending payrolls. You can accept or modify the amounts in the new pending payrolls.

The amounts you enter here are MONTHLY amounts. These amounts will be pro-rated for employees who are paid weekly or fortnightly.

Notice that the allowances are divided into CPF-payable and CPF-not-payable. This distinction is only meaningful for employees who are liable for CPF.

Choose the relevant allowances and enter amounts. [Top]

iv. Deductions Tabbed Page

Contribution to SHARE field - For those employees who wish to make voluntary contributions to the Social Help and Assistance Raised by Employees Donations scheme.

Opt-Out of Self-Help Group field - This field is only activated for employees whose ‘Nationality’ is ‘S’ or ‘PR’. However, in the case of those Singaporeans or PRs whose ‘Race’ is ‘Malay’ then it is deactivated, that is Malays cannot opt out of contributing to MBMF. [Top]

v. Notes Tabbed Page

Free-flow text entry for you to entry whatever you want about the employees. Top]

### 4. Main Menu/Setup “Public Holidays”

This is provided in case the Singapore Government announces revisions to public holidays during the year and you wish to manually edit them.

The public holidays dates are very important when determining the leave taken by employees between two dates. Please do not adjust them unless such revisions are gazetted by the Government.[Top]

### 5. Main Menu/Setup “Foreign Workers Levy”

This is provided in case the Singapore Government announces revisions to FWL during the year and you wish to manually edit them.

Please do not adjust unless such revisions are gazetted by the Government.[Top]

### 6. Main Menu/Setup “Accpac Settings”

You can export a GL Distribution Summary to Accpac for DOS. In order to do this, you must state how various settings in your Accpac system are set up, eg do you have multi-currency in Accpac’s GL enabled (even if you do not actually use it).

The Home Currency, Rate Type and Account Codes must be already defined in your Accpac GL for the importation of payroll data to be successful.[Top]

### 7. Main Menu/Setup “Types of Leave”

These are predefined and read-only. The types are Annual, Medical, Unpaid, Compassionate, Maternity and Marriage. [Top]

### 8. Main Menu/Setup “Job Costing”

These follow the Accpac definitions of Job Number, Job Phase and Job Category. Although you cannot presently export to Accpac’s Job Costing module, this format will facilitate compatibility.

A job must have a Job Number if you wish to use Job Costing. Job Phase and Category are optional. [Top]

### 9. Main Menu/Setup “Bank Codes”

If you wish to pay your employees through IBG, you will need to record their bank sort codes, bank branch codes, account numbers and account names. This Bank Codes facility allows you to sort bank sort codes for ease of data-entry when entering the employees’ bank details. [Top]

## Time Cards and Leave

### 1. Time Cards

The programme uses the approach that before you generate a new payroll you enter time card data and verify the resulting hours calculations (of ordinary and overtime hours) are correct. Then you transfer the hours to a temporary table. When a new payroll is generated, the hours are automatically added to the new payroll.

It is strongly recommended that you enter the biodata and pay setup of employees before importing time card. The programme does allow you to import records of employees not presently in the system. It also allows you to add those ‘new’ employees to the employee database. However, you will still have to modify the biodata (which will have default values for nationality, date of birth etc) and particularly the pay setup.

There are two ways of entering Time Card data into the programme. You can either import or manually enter.

To import, click the command button ‘Import Time Card Data’. You will be prompted with:

You can import from a text or an Excel file. It is recommended for both types of file you omit the field names and have as the first row idealised dummy data such as:

0,”DUMMY”,”DUMMY”,1/1/01,9:00:00,13:00:00,14:00:00,18:00:00,18:30:00,19:30:00,9

Click Yes and you will be prompted as to the file type. Select appropriately and the import will proceed. You will then be in the data-cleaning area:

Here you will have to delete the dummy record (right-click menu). Then you should check and if necessary modify the data for all records. Note that you can readily records not in the current payroll month (and delete them) and also you can add any new IDs to the employee biodata.

When you happy with the data you may transfer to the temporary area for the new payroll to await the generation of pay calculation hours.

To generate the pay calculation hours use the command button ‘Generate TC Hours for Next Payroll’. You will see:

You may transfer these hours to the new payroll. [Top]

### 2. Leave

This data-entry form has a number of features. When you enter the start and end dates of the leave the system will calculate the number of working days taking into account the length of the working week for the employee and any public holidays. If the start and last day are the same date then by default the system will calculate that as one day. However, you may click the ‘Is a Half Day?’ checkbox to designate it as as a half day if applicable.

If you designate Leave Type as being ‘Unpaid’ then you are prompted as to whether you wish to transfer the unpaid days to the new payroll. If the new payroll has not been generated yet then the transfer cannot proceed and you should open this form again later when you have generated it. Upon successful transfer, the new payroll will calculate a deduction in respect of the unpaid leave. [Top]

## How do I generate a new payroll?

If you are generating payroll based on time card data then you should have entered or imported the relevant time cards using the command buttons of the previous tabbed page “Time Cards / Leave”. This will mean that there is now time card data being held in a temporary data ready to be inserted into a new payroll when it is generated.

The above screen shows that you are about to generate a month-end (week 4) payroll. Click on ‘Generate New Payroll’ command button. It will generate a new payroll – called a ‘Pending Payroll’ because you can modify it or cancel it. The new payroll will consist of those employees whose biodata and pay setup details have been previously entered and who are current (that is, have not left or have left but in this month). As it is week 4 then employees of all payroll frequencies, that is weekly, fortnightly and monthly, will be included. If it was week 1 then only weekly-paid employees would be included; if week 2 then weekly- and fortnightly-paid; if week 3 then only weekly-paid; week 4 all. [Top]

Having clicked on ‘Generate New Payroll’ you will be asked to confirm. Say Yes and the system will prompt you if you wish to revise the suggested payroll date. Having responded, you will then be advised if time card data has been transferred into the new payroll. Finally, you will be presented with a form displaying the generated payroll. You may readily modify a lot of the data to get your payroll just right:

Various command buttons at the bottom of the screen provide you with information to help you judge that the payroll is just right. The first command button ‘List All Summary’ gives you a quick summary with totals of the current state of the payroll:

The command button ‘PTD Committed for CPF’ is invaluable in respect of those employees who are liable for CPF and whose payroll frequency is weekly or fortnightly. To ensure the correct monthly calculation of CPF, the system uses the PTD plus the current week 4 data to calculate CPF, that is the CPF for these employees is not solely calculated based on week 4 data.

The command button ‘View/Edit Leave Taken’ is most valuable for when you want to transfer unpaid leave days to the new payroll. For an explanation, see Leave.

Likewise, the command button ‘Outstanding Leave / Employee Ceasing’ is for when you want to calculate any in lieu of leave payment.

A useful feature is the ‘Show CPF YTD’ command button found on the tabbed page CPF Calc. This summarises YTD figures for Ordinary Wages, Additional Wages, CPF for Employee and CPF for Employer. Then if Total Wages are greater than $100k it calculates the Additional Wage Ceiling and determines whether there has been an over- / under- payment of CPF. If there has then it is necessary to do manual adjustments to CPF computations in the current or future payrolls. [Top]

## How do I modify/cancel/commit a new payroll?

Main Menu/New Pay “View/Edit New Payroll”, “Cancel New Payroll” and “Commit New Payroll” command buttons.

These command buttons only become available once you have generated a new payroll.

The ‘View/Edit New Payroll’ command button will take you to the editing form for the individual employees’ pay details, which is the same form you are presented to after generating the new payroll.

If you are unhappy with the new pending payroll, for example because several employees were missed out because you forgot to enter their pay setup details, then you can completely abandon the pending payroll by cancelling it using the ‘Cancel New Payroll’ command button. Once cancelled, you cannot ‘undo’. The display status for the current payroll will return to ‘Next Payroll – Not Generated Yet’ and the ‘Generate New Payroll’ command button will become available again.

To see the generated payroll in summary form, you can click the command button ‘Payroll Summary’. This report is quite useful for quick ‘eyeballing’ the payroll. It is complemented by the command button ‘List Payroll by Employee’ which shows individual details.

If you are happy with the pending payroll, you may print pay slips using the command button ‘Print Pay Slips / Salary Vouchers’. Please note that you must print the pay slips before committing the payroll. You can print pay slips and salary vouchers as many as you like.

Once you are happy with a pending payroll (and have printed the pay slips), you may commit it using the ‘Commit New Payroll’ command button. This changes the pending payroll into permanent (and read-only) status and so that payroll is over. The display status for the current payroll is advanced to the next payroll, the message displayed becomes ‘Next Payroll – Not Generated Yet’ and the ‘Generate New Payroll’ command button becomes available again. [Top]

## Upgrades

Registered users in their first year of purchase and other registered users whose annual subscriptions are up-to-date receive revisions in respect of CPF tables etc as and when they become available. Upgrades in terms of payroll programme enhancements are offered at a special discounted price. [Top]

## Demo Version

Fully functional but time limited.