Paying for measured output (piece rates)

A rate card says what a unit of work sells for. A piece rate says what it pays the person who did it. Pay › Piece rates puts the two side by side, because the gap between them is your margin, and setting a pay rate is deciding how much of it to keep.

Piece work is only paid for a measure line that says who earned it: set Who earned it on each line of the measure. Piece rates pay on workstreams that pay by measures, which is where every workstream starts; a workstream can pay by completed job or by route stage instead. See paying by the job or by the route stage. Every contractor's piece work is listed on the contractor ledger, where a line can be held or disputed before it is paid.

Before you start

• Piece rates hang off a rate card, so you need one first. With none, the tab says No rate cards yet and points you to Commercial. See rate cards and uplifts.
• Setting a rate needs Manage pay rates, not a Commercial permission: running the sales ledger says what work sells for, and what it pays is a different decision. The tab also reads your rate cards and your people, so whoever opens it needs Manage commercial and Manage users as well. Piece rates are part of contractor pay, on the Crew plan and above.

Setting a rate

Open Pay › Piece rates and pick the card from the list at the top. Every item on the card is listed — Code, Work, Unit, Sells for, Pays and Per person — with a count of how many are priced. An item nobody has priced shows Not set.

Press Set on an item, or click its row. The dialog is titled with the item's description and shows its code, unit and sell rate. Then:

• Who this rate is for — Everybody, for the workspace rate, or Chosen people. With Chosen people, tick each person who gets this rate: Search people finds them, and Tick shown ticks everyone the search shows. Anybody with a rate of their own already has it shown beside their name. A person's own rate overrides the workspace rate for them: a gang leader and an apprentice laying the same kerb are not always paid the same for it.
• Pays, per unit — the amount.

Save. With several people ticked, the button reads Save for N people and gives them all the same figure. If they are on different rates now, the amount box starts empty and reads Different rates now. Rates set for particular people are listed under Per person.

Empty is not zero

Clear the amount and the button becomes Remove the rate, or Remove for N people with several ticked. That is not the same as zero:

• Empty means nobody has decided. The item pays nothing, however much of it is measured.
• Zero is a decision that the work pays nothing to the person doing it.

Piece rates carry no start date. A change applies to runs worked out from then on; closed runs keep what they paid.

How piece work is priced in a run

When a measure line does name the person who earned it, a run prices it like this:

• the measure must be approved, not held or disputed on the contractor ledger, and on a job whose workstream doesn't pay another way;
• it counts in the run whose period includes the last day the measure covers;
• it pays the quantity times that person's own rate for the item, or the workspace rate if they have none. An item with no rate earns nothing;
• it appears on the person's statement as the item's description, with the quantity, unit and rate, and reaches your payroll provider as piece work. For a contractor, it feeds whatever Piece work feeds under Pay › Contractor withholding › What feeds what;
• for a member of a gang, it is paid in the leader's line.

Sell rates, uplifts and invoicing are unaffected by any of this: a piece rate never changes what a client is charged.