The Averaged Salaries Module is designed for calculating pay for sessional music teachers. The Module calculates expected pay over a period, then averages that amount into the nominated number of pays dates. This allows for teachers to receive regular amounts of pay even over holiday periods and other time off.
A ‘pay session’ is the collection of pay dates over which pay is to be averaged. This period can be of any length and include any number of pay dates. However, each pay session should ideally be equivalent to the billing periods plus any holiday periods immediately after the billing period.
So, if students are billed for each semester at a time, the pay sessions should cover:
- All pay dates that fall within Semester 1 and the mid-year holidays
- All pay dates that fall within Semester 2 and the end of year holidays
At the beginning of a pay session, data is imported from the Tuition Enrolments Table and the Ensemble Enrolments Table. These will be imported as ‘adjustment records’ in the Salaries Module. Each adjustment lists a student, a number of lessons and the total pay for those lessons. These amounts are added together, then averaged over the pay dates in the pay session.
If the enrolments change over the course of the pay session (such as students withdrawing or enrolling late), then new adjustments must be added, and these are used to modify the average pay starting with the following pay date.
For example:
Smallville Secondary College charges students half-yearly. Each student is charged for 16 lessons per half-year. The lesson fee for a 30 minute individual lesson is $26.00 and the teacher receives $23.67 of this in their pay packet (the remainder being taken up by superannuation & work cover).
Mr Smith has 8 students that commence with him at the beginning of the year. They are all enrolled for a 30 minute individual lesson.
Mr Smith will give each of these students 16 lessons between February and July (the first 6 months of the school year). Therefore, we can calculate that his total earnings in that period will be:
16 lessons x 8 students x $23.67 per lesson = $3,029.76
Smallville Secondary College pays its teachers monthly. In the period February to July, Mr Smith will receive 6 pays. If we divide Mr Smith's total earnings by the number of pay periods (6), we can calculate a Standard Monthly Pay of $504.96.
If there are no changes to Mr Smith's enrolments, he should receive $504.96 every month from February to July.
At the beginning of Term 3, the school commences a new billing period and so pay session must be calculated at this time. If Mr Smith gains 4 more students at the beginning of Term 3, we can calculate his total earnings for the period August to January to be:
16 lessons x 12 students x $23.67 per lesson = $4,544.64
Again, if we divide this total by 6 pays, we can calculate a Standard Monthly Pay of $757.44. Therefore, this is the amount that Mr Smith should be paid every month from August to January.
Of course, life is not quite as simple as this - and adjustments will probably need to be made throughout the semester! Mr Smith will get some new students, some will discontinue, and others will change their lesson type.
However, the principle is still the same. For each of these adjustments, Mr Smith will still be paid (or have a deduction made) of a certain amount and we can factor this in to his Standard Pay.
The end result of this is that the teachers can count on a standard income, with minimal fluctuations during school holiday periods. And of course, it doesn't make any difference to the school because they are still only being paid for the lessons they teach. It's just being averaged out.
Further Information
Help documents that details the pay procedures for this module in depth are found here in this knowledgebase
Before you use the Salaries Module for the first time, make sure that:
All staff details are entered before entering Subject Codes and Tuition Fees.
Each teacher to be paid for tuition has their ‘Employment Type’ set to ‘Sessional’.
Each teacher is set to ‘Current Staff’ in the ‘Category’ field.
Subject Codes and Tuition Fees are updated before entering tuition enrolments.
Tuition Fees include both a 'Lesson Fee' and a 'Staff Pay Per Lesson Fee'.
Tuition Fees include the number of lessons per billing period.
Cost centres are set up, if they are to be used.
Before attempting to run the pays from Music Monitor, you will also need to know:
The number of pay periods in this billing cycle.
The pay dates in this billing cycle.
When you are sure that all data is correct, you can do a pay run.