What is an increment?
An increment is an increase or addition to an employee's pay, especially one that is part of a series based on a fixed scale.
What is the Increment Process?
This process applies only to employees who have a pay scale salary.
Increments cannot be automatically generated for those on personal rate salaries.
Using the increment process eliminates the need to manually create a salary amendment for standard annual or periodic salary increments. This process can apply to all employees or a group of employees in an organization on a common date each year.
Increments may also be applied on a date specific to the employee's post appointment, for example, 12 months from the start date or upon turning 18 or 21 years old.
When increments are processed from the CorePay side, they are generated during a payroll run and typically have a reference or reason code starting with "PAY" followed by a number indicating they were generated from CorePay.
When increments are processed from CorePersonnel, they are generated by a nightly increment job. This job usually generates increments a fixed number of days before the due date to allow HR and payroll to approve or reject them.
Key CorePersonnel increment attributes
Increment Due Date
This is the date on which the increment is due to be applied to the post appointment salary record. For example, if an employee starts in the organization on January 1, 2018, the employee may be due for an increment on January 1, 2019.
Managing increment due dates
You can capture the increment due date and the increment hold indicator on a salary record during the appointment stage.
These can be manually entered by the user or automatically calculated based on the terms and conditions assigned to the post appointment.
You can update the increment due date and increment hold indicator for an employee directly on the pay profile screen.
Increment details are managed at the post appointment level. The increment due date is associated with a salary record on the post appointment, not on the employee record itself.
Therefore, if an employee has multiple post appointments, it is crucial to record the increment due date for each post appointment as relevant.
Increment system job
The CorePersonnel nightly job reviews all employees' increment due dates, creates a new salary record based on the pay scale point increment rules, and generates a new increment due date for the employee's salary. For example, if the increment due date is set for January 1, 2019, the increment system job will identify that the employee is due for an increment on that date. It will then move the employee to the next point on the scale by creating an approved salary amendment and aligning this to the employee's pay profile. The new increment due date will be updated to 12 months later, on January 1, 2020.
Increment hold indicator
This indicator ensures that the increment job does not process for the employee on the increment due date. For example, if the increment hold indicator is set against an employee's record on January 1, 2019, during the review on that date, no increment will be applied to the employee's record. However, if the increment hold indicator is removed a week later, and the increment due date is still present for January 1, 2019, the job will process it at that point, and the pay will be backdated for the seven days missed.
Pay scale point increment rules
Rules are established for each pay scale point to control:
The next point available.
The progression pay scale and point to be used when the maximum point has been reached on the current pay scale.
The length of time at the current point (if different from the standard 12 months).
A bar point, which stops an employee from incrementing beyond that point.
Age restrictions on progression to the next point.
Increment due date policy
The increment due date will not be removed when an employee reaches the top of the scale.
If a manual salary amendment is made to bring the employee to the top point on the scale, the increment due date will not be removed.
If bar points are used, the increment due date will also remain as the top of the scale will not be reached by the increment process.
The increment due date will only be removed if the increment process results in moving to the top point on the scale.