Payroll Adjustments Explained

Payroll adjustments are the recurring allowances, deductions, taxable earnings, and pay premiums that sit on a payee's own record and feed into every run they're part of. They live on the payee's page, organized into three cards: Pay (rates and premiums), Allowances, reimbursements & taxable earnings, and Deductions.

The Kinds

Every adjustment row — regardless of kind — shares the same basic shape: a name, a value (a flat dollar amount or a percentage of a basis), a frequency, an effective date range, and an optional GL code for your chart of accounts.

Allowances

Pick from a standard list or choose "Other" to type a custom name:

Allowances are paid on top of wages, never taxed, and never counted toward the union dues basis.

Reimbursements

Its own card section with its own Add reimbursement button, but a single standard name — Reimbursement — since receipt-based repayments don't need the same category spread allowances do. Choose "Other" for anything more specific. Reimbursements are non-taxable and paid on top of wages, exactly like allowances.

Taxable Earnings

The standard name list here is deliberately short and separate from the Allowances list, so a taxable and a non-taxable per diem can never be confused by name alone:

Adding an Allowance, Reimbursement, or Taxable Earning

On the payee's page, go to the Allowances, reimbursements & taxable earnings card, click Add allowance, Add reimbursement, or Add taxable earning in the relevant sub-section, pick a name (or "Other" to type your own), set a flat dollar amount or a percentage, choose a frequency, and set an effective date range.

Deductions

Seven standard deduction names, plus an Other option for anything custom:

Deductions have three fields allowances don't:

• Pre-tax — a checkbox marking whether the deduction comes out before income tax is calculated. New rows start post-tax; picking a name never ticks it for you.
• Benefit type — appears once Pre-tax is ticked: 401(k), Roth 401(k), 403(b), Roth 403(b), 457, SIMPLE IRA, HSA, FSA — medical, or FSA — dependent care. This is what tells the payroll provider which kind of benefit it is, which decides the contribution limit and the W-2 box. See Role & Pay.
• Lump-sum target — an optional total to collect. Once the deduction has withheld that much across however many runs it takes, it stops automatically — useful for paying off an advance or a fixed garnishment amount.

Premiums (Pay Section)

Premiums are contract add-ons on top of base pay — often role-driven (Dance Captain, Media Fee) or a percentage of scale. They're entered under the Pay section, alongside the payee's rates.

For unions with configured contractual premiums (Actors' Equity is the main example), the premium name is picked from that union's own list, pre-filling the standard amount or percentage. For payees whose union doesn't define contractual premiums, or for a custom entry, you type a name directly. Unlike allowances, premiums are wages — they're taxed and counted in the dues and benefits basis, same as base pay.

Frequency

Every adjustment (allowance, reimbursement, taxable earning, deduction, or premium) has one of three frequencies:

One-Time Additions on a Specific Run

Outside of a payee's standing record, you can also add a one-time line directly to their entry within a specific payroll run — useful for something that only applies this week, like a one-off allowance, reimbursement, or taxable per diem, an activity-based union premium (an understudy performance, a rehearsal overtime session), or a manual payment line. These run-only additions don't change the payee's standing record and don't carry forward to the next run. The run-entry version of the allowance/reimbursement/taxable-per-diem picker offers the same three-way choice described above — see Adding Employees.

If a contract premium added this way should actually be a standing part of the payee's pay going forward, there's an option to save it to the payee's profile instead — that turns it into the same recurring premium described above rather than a one-time line.

Salary Proration

For performance-based union contracts, a full pay week is 8 performances. If a payee works fewer than 8 in a week, their base pay and any premiums prorate down proportionally; if they work more than 8, the overage is added on top of the full package. This proration is specific to performance-based contracts — it isn't a general calendar-based "days worked this period" calculation.

Validation Rules

Amendment Runs vs. Payroll Adjustments

Best Practices

• Use the standard name list where it fits — it keeps reporting consistent across payees
• Set an effective end date on anything temporary so it doesn't keep applying after it should stop
• Use a lump-sum target on deductions that should stop once a fixed amount is collected, rather than remembering to remove them manually
• Double-check pre-tax vs. post-tax on deductions — it changes the payee's taxable wages
• Use GL codes consistently if your company relies on them for reporting

Next Steps

Continue with Reviewing Payroll to verify all calculations, or see Payroll Calculations to understand how amounts are computed.