PieceWorker – Jobs (and other optional data)

PieceWorker allows you to create up to 255 “jobs”, with each job being defined as either hourly or piecework. You are in total control of your list of jobs…you can add more at any time to provide more detail on labor usage and crop yields.

A VERY simple operation might have only one job. To use a time clock to track hourly work, your only job might be “General hourly work”. To use PieceWorker only to help you pay blueberry pickers, you might have a single piecework job called “Picking blueberries” that is used to count blueberry buckets/flats (and time spent picking).

Most operations will have ten or more jobs such as “General hourly work”, “Picking cucumbers”, “Picking squash”, etc. They may even have multiple hourly jobs to provide separate totals by crop, such as “Hourly cotton work”, “Hourly tobacco work”, “Stringing pepper plants”, etc.

You might assign a pay rate to every job you create, depending on your chosen destination for processed PieceWorker data (if you send processed data to a payroll system, you would normally enter pay rates there and not in PieceWorker). Job rates can be FIXED (e.g. $10 per hour or $0.50 per bucket/flat) or they can be entered in a rate table with an effective date, allowing you to increase or decrease pay rates over time. If necessary, the rate table can also vary the pay rate based on the work location or other collected data. You can also assign a default hourly pay rate at the employee level.

You can optionally use “related jobs” to pay what is commonly referred to as “incentive pay”. For example, you might pay 25 cents per bucket plus $3 per hour for picking berries.

PieceWorker can guarantee a minimum hourly pay rate if your payroll accounting system is not capable of doing so. (When employing some migrant workers to do hourly and piecework jobs, you generally have to guarantee that they will make a certain minimum average hourly rate for the pay period.)

You have the option of collecting up to three items in addition to jobs. The most common additional item being collected is the location – the farm/field/block on which the work is done, providing you with hours spent and buckets/units harvested at each location. Other items commonly collected include the variety of crop (sometimes already known based on the location), the crew that performed the work (if employees wander from crew to crew), etc. Sometimes this additional information simply provides hours/units by location/variety/crew/etc. Other times the additional information is used to control the destination of the data, for example sending CREW1 data to one payroll company and CREW2 data to another. The additional data is sometimes also used to departmentalize the labor costs sent to the payroll accounting system, for example sending all “cucumber” work to the “Cucumber” accounting department, and sending all “cotton” work to the “Cotton” accounting department.