7.7 Rules and Formulas
Rules and Formulas
The Rules tab contains the options for additional rules and formulas, which are listed in the Type column. These statements are executed top-to-bottom.
The arrow buttons can be used to move selected items up or down. The double arrows move the selection 10 places at a time instead of one at a time.
RULES
There are two types of rules, and no limit to the number and order of rules set for any Day Program. The first type of rule can limit the time of an allocated time category, and convert the remaining time into the ‘Push To’ time category.
Example: an employee can be allocated NT for the whole day ’00:00 - 24:00’ and a rule put in place to limit the NT to say, 8 hours, pushing the remainder time to OT1.5.
The other type of rule is used to fill one time category from another where necessary.
Example: if time categories are allocated separately (NT and OT/Unauthorized OT) and the employee needs to work a certain number of hours of NT before earning OT, a rule can be put in place to ‘Take From’ OT to fill up any short NT on the day. This ‘Stolen Overtime’ amount can also be stored using the ‘Save as’ time category.
Rules and formulas follow an order of preference, and can be moved up or down in priority using the arrows on the bottom right-hand side.
One can control- or shift-select rules or formulas and click ‘Copy Item/s’ to copy into memory and then paste/add into the Rules tab of another Day Program by clicking ‘Paste Item/s’. If ‘Copy All’ is used, then right-clicking on ‘Paste All’ will present an option to append copied items to existing entries, rather than replacing them.
When applying rules, it may be easier to manage the rule of ‘Taking OT to fill up NT’ using the ’Push To’ method, as only one allocation and one rule is necessary. However if an employee need not work a predefined amount of NT before earning OT, then rules may be excluded and the Allocations alone will be sufficient.
In an instance of employees being limited to a certain number of hours of any time category, you can set a ‘Max’ condition rule, pushing the extra time to ‘None’ (first entry in drop-down list). This will eliminate the additional time completely.
Placing a tick in the ‘Advanced’ checkbox will enable conditions to be set for the selected rule or formula, as in the below image.
In this example the Training Leave counter will increment by one if the Training time category is greater than one hour.
The If Condition can be set to check the previous day’s value for the selected time category or counter by placing a check in the box for ‘Previous Day’.
This differs from the ‘Previous Day’ options above the dropdowns, which can be used to obtain yesterday’s actual values for use.
To see results of the day program with a particular rule or formula not applied, tick the checkbox for ‘Formula Disabled’.
If ‘Post Process’ is ticked, the selected rule or formula will be processed only after all other calculations have been executed.
FORMULAS
Formulas only need to be created to manage more advanced policies and complicated requirements. Multiple formulas can be created for any Day Program where the standard parameters cannot produce the desired results. Formulas will use the totals processed by the other tabs as input, and further process these totals. There is no standard involved when creating a formula solution. Any site requiring a formula solution may have unusual or specific requirements. The operators are basic mathematical combinations.
Round will allow a Rounding group to be applied.
Divide (Round) is normal division returning the quotient of dividend and divisor, Divide (Floor) returns a rounded-down (floored) quotient.
Example 1:
We could use two formulas to calculate ‘Total Time’, using the sum of NT, OT1.5 and OT2.0 and outputting this into a newly created ‘Total Time’ time category. This new ‘Total Time’ can be viewed in the Daily Details and reports screen and is treated like any other time category in JT.
Example 2:
A formula using Constant Time and Advanced conditions:
In the screenshot on the left, we are adding an hour (using the Constant Time entry, at the top of the time category list), to Short Time. However we are doing this ‘Only IF’ the employee has left work more than 30 minutes early. If the employee has no Early Departure time, then JT will not add an hour short time.
Besides time categories and counters setup in Jarrison, custom fields (set from Employee Details) can also be used in rules and formulas.
Note that there are three special fields in the dropdown lists of available time categories and counters, named Calc1, Calc2, and Calc3. These fields can hold decimal results and can thus be useful as temporary holders in certain types of formula calculations e.g. calculating percentages, as time category calculations are done in time format and counters are restricted in only being able to store whole integer values.
Date-driven additional custom fields can also be used in formulas, they are prefixed “EF”.
Related Articles
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