About Optional Fields

The Optional Fields setup window displays in Payroll Setup if you use Sage 300 Transaction Analysis and Optional Field Creator, a separately licensed package that you can purchase and use with any edition of payroll.

Optional Fields allow you to customize your payroll system by letting you store an unlimited amount of additional information with employee, earning/deduction, and tax records, and with timecards, manual check transactions, and payroll processing.

Security

As with other payroll functions, you must be assigned the proper security permissions to set up, assign, edit, or delete optional fields, if security is turned on for your company database.

Setting Up and Using Optional Fields

Because you can select records by optional field code on several reports, optional fields also provide an additional means of analyzing employees and transactions in payroll.

If you use exactly the same optional fields in payroll and General Ledger, General Ledger will retain the optional field information used in transactions that you send from payroll.

You can use an unlimited number of optional fields in payroll. However, you must first define optional fields for your Sage 300 Payroll system using the Optional Fields setup window.

After you have set up optional fields for your Sage 300 Payroll system, you use the Payroll Optional Fields window in Payroll Setup to define optional fields for use with the following payroll records and transactions:

  • Employee Payroll
  • Employee Earnings/Deductions
  • Employee Taxes
  • Earnings/Deductions
  • Taxes
  • Timecards
  • Timecard Earnings/Deductions
  • Timecard Taxes
  • Timecard PJC Details (if you use Sage 300 Project and Job Costing)
  • Manual Checks
  • Manual Checks Earnings/Deductions
  • Manual Checks Taxes
  • Manual Checks PJC Details (if you use Sage 300 Project and Job Costing)
  • Transactions
  • Transaction Earnings/Deductions
  • Transaction Taxes
  • Transaction PJC Details (if you use Sage 300 Project and Job Costing)
  • Payroll Processing

The list above represents the specific areas of a record or transactions for which you can define optional fields. For example, you can define optional fields for the employee in general, for the employee’s earnings/deductions, or for the employee’s taxes.