EBA Overview

What is an enterprise agreement?

Generally speaking, an enterprise agreement is between one or more national system employers and their employees, as specified in the agreement. Enterprise agreements are negotiated by the parties through collective bargaining in good faith, primarily at the enterprise level. Under the Fair Work Act 2009, an enterprise can mean any kind of business, activity, project or undertaking.

Also refer:

• Fair Work Commission - Enterprise agreements

• Employment New Zealand - Collective agreements

EBAs in Workbench

Enterprise Bargaining Agreements (EBA’s) provide the rules for the conversion of the number of hours worked by an Employee into the number of hours paid plus allowances, and the associated Standard Rate for that paid time or allowance per Employee. The rules applied in EBA Profiles can be simple or complicated, often resulting in situations where there is an inevitable manual input to the system for some uncommon combinations and requirements. Workbench has the ability to group multiple profiles into EBA Schemes, which are then applied on a job-by-job basis.

It is important to note that, while the EBA module is part of Workbench's payroll process, it is not a payroll software itself. Rates of pay and allowances are contained in the payroll software, and Workbench's role is to convey the quantities of each payroll code to that software. 

The Time and Allowances captured in Workbench are costed to the Job on a Standard Cost basis. This costing takes place in real time for an entered timesheet line. Note that this costing is NOT typically the rate that the Employee is paid per hour. This Standard Costing is normally a composite cost comprised of a wage band cost plus some other recoveries for holiday pay, sick pay, overhead, etc. This subject is detailed elsewhere in the Workbench documentation under Employee Classes. 

Process Overview

All EBA calculations are done on an individual's Timesheet, either daily, weekly, or mobile entry methods.

EBA Profiles are created for each category of employee. These profiles can be assigned to each User as their default, or if your situation requires users to select from multiple profiles (such as shift work), you can enable the EBA Profiles field in Grid Management under the desired Timesheet type, then populate the list of allowed profiles in the Users Extended Productivity.

If appropriate, you can group multiple EBA Profiles into a single EBA Scheme, and then apply the scheme to individual Jobs using Job Maintenance. These schemes will override any default profiles applied to the timesheet users for time against that job.

Timesheets are entered either by the users themselves or by an administrator, along with any manual allowances that are not generated by the EBA Interpreter.

Once timesheets are submitted, the payroll officer can use the EBA Interpreter to generate overtime and allowances based on the original entries. This generation populates the Payroll area of Timesheet Administration, leaving the original lines intact. With the Control Parameter "Recost Time from EBA" set to Yes, the original transaction will be updated to reflect the total cost of the payroll section for that line. The recosting of the Time transactions from PayrollTransactions, take the cost breakdown of the PayrollTransactions into account. e.g. Base, Overhead, Other. This is to get a more accurate allocation of costs to GL accounts. However, for EBA allowances that were given an "Activity" during setup, these lines will be added to the timesheet lines with their own cost and will not add cost to the original transaction line. After generation, it is the payroll officer's responsibility to review the outputs, making manual adjustments or additions as needed to ensure the values sent to the payroll software are accurate.

To decide whether to bill EBA generated Payroll transactions or not, use the attribute on the job's Charge Type called "Billing from EBA". 
When this attribute is ticked:

• the EBA/Payroll transactions are displayed in Get Sales.

• The Price Code rules on the Job will be applied to the EBA/Payroll transactions to calculate the selling price.
  
  
  

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To finalise the Workbench side of payroll, create a Payroll Batch and filter for the target week(s) timesheets.