Usage Guide & Workflow

Stage 1: Set up the pricing (one-time, then occasional)

1. Create your Activity Types ("Loading", "Washing", "Offloading", …) if they don't already exist.
2. For each priced unit of work, create a Casual Activity Item: pick the activity, pick the item, and set the Costing Rate (the pay per single unit).

• As a convenience, an Activity Type form carries a "Casual Item Cost" button that jumps straight to the filtered list of Casual Activity Items for that activity, so you can review or add pricing in context.

3. If a rate isn't defined for an activity+item pair, the daily payout will refuse to fetch a rate and will tell the operator to go and create the Casual Activity Item first. This is deliberate as it prevents silently paying KSh 0 for unpriced work.

Stage 2: Capture the day's work and pay (daily)

Prerequisite: casual workers must have clocked attendance on their dedicated casual shift for the day. The app reads attendance because it does not create it.

In a new Casual Payroll Payout:

1. Set Company, Shift Type (the casual shift), and Attendance Date.
2. Fill the Casual Payroll Payout Item table for each activity done that day, choose the activity and item, and enter the quantity. The system fetches the rate automatically and computes each line's amount. The Total Quantity and Total Amount (the day's pay pool) update as you go.
3. Click Get Employees. The system pulls everyone whose attendance matches the chosen shift + date + company, and lists them in the Casual Payroll Payout Employee table and that includes their check-in/check-out times.
4. Click Calculate Payout. The day's Total Amount is divided equally among the fetched workers, and each worker's share is written to their row.
5. Submit the document.

Design note — equal split: the daily payout distributes the total day's pool evenly across all present workers (Total Amount ÷ number of workers). It does not attribute specific piece-work lines to specific individuals. The model assumes the casual crew works the day's tasks collectively and shares the proceeds equally. If you need per-individual piece pay, that is outside what this tool does today.

Stage 3: Roll up the period and push to payroll (weekly)

In a new Casual Salary Structure Assignment Tool:

1. Set the Attendance Start Date and Attendance End Date for the pay period.
2. Click Calculate Payout. The system finds every submitted, not-yet-processed Casual Payroll Payout in the range, sums each worker's daily amounts into a single per-worker total, and fills the Casuals Weekly Amount table. In the same step, each daily payout it consumes is marked Payment Processed so it can't be double-counted.
3. Choose the Salary Structure to assign. For the period in which statutory deductions should apply, pick the structure that includes the NSSF component so the deduction is taken in that run.
4. Save and Submit. On submission the tool creates one Salary Structure Assignment per worker, with:

• base = the worker's total for the period,
• from date = the period end date,
• a back-reference linking the assignment to this roll-up document.

From here the workers are normal payroll subjects: the standard Frappe HR payroll run picks up their assignments and produces payslips with the right deductions.

The "Payment Processed" lock and how it reverses

This flag is the integrity mechanism that stops the same day's money being paid twice.

• A daily Casual Payroll Payout starts unprocessed.
• When a period roll-up consumes it (during Calculate Payout on the assignment tool), it is flipped to processed. Processed payouts are excluded from future roll-ups — so re-running, or running an overlapping period, won't double-pay.
• If you cancel the period roll-up (the Casual Salary Structure Assignment Tool document), the app walks back through the processed daily payouts in that date range and un-processes them, returning them to the pool so a corrected roll-up can pick them up again.

In short: the flag is set when money is committed to a pay run, and released when that pay run is cancelled. Operators generally shouldn't toggle it by hand.