Effective Dates and Cost Pay Rates Structure

Vision's effective dates feature allows you to specify when a change will occur in the cost and pay rate that is associated with a specified labor rate, labor category, labor code, or labor override table.

The date on which a change will occur is the "effective date" of the change. The effective dates feature is available in the Accounting, Payroll, and Billing applications. It is also known as the "date-based rates" or "rate structure" feature.

When you use the effective dates feature, Vision looks at the detail date on an employee's timesheet to determine what rates to apply for labor charges. You can schedule changes to occur on any date within a timesheet period, and you can also specify changes in rates of different types to occur on different dates in the same timesheet period.

Setting Up Effective Dates

You establish effective dates in the Effective Date column on the following Vision rate tables:

• Accounting and Payroll Cost/Pay Rate Tables in Accounting > Cost/Pay Rate Tables
  • Labor Rates
  • Labor Categories
  • Labor Codes
• Billing Rate Tables in Billing > Billing Rate Tables
  • Labor Rates
  • Labor Categories
  • Labor Codes
  • Labor Overrides

Before you establish effective dates, you must first enable cost rate tables, pay rate tables, or both on the General tab of Configuration > Accounting > System Settings. To use the effective dates feature in the Billing application, you must also enable the effective dates feature on the Miscellaneous tab of Configuration > Billing > General.

After you enable this feature and create rate tables with effective dates, you cannot disable effective dates for rate tables until you delete all effective dates from existing rate tables.

Accounting and Payroll

You can use the effective dates feature with the Accounting or Payroll applications when you need to cost or pay one or more employees at a rate that differs from their usual rate, perhaps on very short notice. This may result from specific project contract stipulations, or from scenarios that involve negotiated or overtime costing or pay terms.

For example, you may need to use the effective dates feature:

• When a project is located in a jurisdiction with different tax laws.
• When some components of a project's work breakdown structure involve hazardous work.
• When your firm takes over a difficult project on negotiated cost or pay terms.
• When an hourly employee, not compensated for travel, requests additional pay to cover commuting expenses to a distant project location.

Billing

You can use the effective dates feature with the Billing application when you need to schedule labor rate changes on a firm-wide basis or for specific groups of employees.

For example, you can use a Labor Rates table to schedule an increase in your firm's billing rate on all projects for work performed by all senior engineers as of July 1, 2014 (effective date).