With our years of experience in payroll computation, one of the most common errors

that we see in businesses is in how they compute their employee’s daily rate. This is
only applicable if your employee’s salary is fix per month and you just deduct absences
and add overtime pays. You might be wondering why this is very important so Ill discuss
some reasons below.

1. You need the correct daily rate of the employee when you are deducting their
absences. If you are deducting absences for your employees, you want to make sure
that you are not under-deducting or over-deducting them. The same applied when you
are deducting their tardy and undertime.

2. Their daily rates have an impact to their tax computation, minimum wage earners
have additional tax benefits here in the Philippines. You need to make sure that their
daily rate is correct so you can properly check if they are minimum wage earners or not.

3. It’s important when computing overtime pays, if you incorrectly computing your
employee’s daily rates, it is more likely that you are incorrectly computing their hourly
rates as well which you normally use in computing their overtime pays.

Here is how you should compute your employee’s daily rates, you can surely come up
with the same result with different formulas but at least this is the most common formula
that we see in many companies.

Daily Rate = (Monthly Rate x (Number of months in a year which is 12)) / Total working
days in a year

With that, how can you know the total number of working days in a year? That is where
the problem usually comes in. But to explain it simply..

We have 52 weeks in a year. If your employees are required to work from Mondays to
Fridays (5 days a week), just multiply 5 by 52 which is 260 but during leap years we
sometimes get additional 1 working day so some companies actually use 261. You can
also see the same figure in BIRs guidelines about the this subject. You can find their
document here.

Here is an example.

If you have an employee with a monthly rate of 11,000 and working 5 days a week.

His\Her daily rate will be

(11,000 x 12) / 261 = 505.75

That 505.75 will be your basis when you are checking if the employee is a minimum
wage earner or not. Which if you look in the DOLE website in NCR, that is above
minimum wage earner so you should deduct taxes to the employee’s salary assuming
that there is no other applicable tax exemption.

If the employee is also required to work during Saturdays with the same monthly rate.
The computation of daily rate will be

(11,000 x 12) / 312 = 423.08

423.08 is below minimum wage and you don’t need to deduct withholding tax to the
employees salary, in fact at the time of this writing (June 2016) 423.08 is below
minimum wage and should be increased to the correct minimum wage.

That rate will also be your basis when computing their absences and their hourly rates
which will be your basis in the computation of their overtime pays.

Trust is very important between employer and employees and correct salary
computation is one way to strengthen it.