I run a small construction company. This is how the framework is for the business. I want to build a system in CODA that helps me manage my business.
One aspect of this is payroll. I don’t need CODA to pay people but to generate pay stubs or equivalent as I enter labour data with an associated cost code. These entries will double as a way to create invoices, based on the employees charge-out rate, and payroll data based on the employees wage.
The issue is that sometimes the charge-out rates change, they may even be different based on the job, and the wages change as I give people raises. If I were to have an employee info validation document that had their charge-out rate and wage, updating these would change all the data generated by old invoices/payroll calculators.
I suppose an un-elegant way of accomplishing this is that each billing period or invoice would have a place for me to manually enter their wage/charge-out rate. I was wondering if there is a more elegant solution to accomplish this?
What you describe is actually the most elegant and proper solution. If the rate/wage can change from item to item on your invoices then it should be a property (a column) on your Invoice Items table. There’s two ways how to have it:
It’s an editable column. You can fill it out manually but you don’t have to. You can make a button to populate values in that column from current rates in a single click. You can also use an automation or the “Value for new rows” functionality but it’s not as reliable as doing it with an explicit button click. The benefit of this approach is that if you need to tweak a rate for a particular job (e.g. you have a gig on special terms) you can easily edit a cell that’s not a formula.
It’s a formula but then you have to separately keep track of rates and periods they were effective. You’d have to make a table of Person / Rate / Effective from Date / Effective to Date and then match each Invoice Item with a Rate through a person and a date. This is more cumbersome because you’d have to maintain that new table and be extra accurate with it. Also, since you cannot edit formula columns in any of the rows, you’d need an extra Rate Override column on the Invoice Items table to be able to enter a special rate for a particular job. So only go this way if you want to track historical rate changes anyway.