Flat rate, hybrid, and two techs on one job

A pay rate in Torqix answers two questions, not one. Kind is whether somebody is hourly or salaried. Basis is what the money is calculated from: hourly, flat rate, or hybrid — flat rate with an hourly floor. Both are on the same line, and every rate you have set before today is hourly on both counts — nothing moved when this arrived.

Setting somebody's rate

Team, down in Pay rates, on that person's card. Only an owner can add a rate, and they need money visibility as well as the key — a manager reading the card is told Setting a rate is an owner's decision — your role can read this history but not add to it.

The Rate box means different things on different bases, and the hint says so: dollars per clocked hour on hourly, dollars per billed hour on flat rate and hybrid. A hybrid also needs an Hourly floor, and it is refused without one — A hybrid arrangement needs an hourly floor — that guarantee is the whole point of it. Put a floor on anything else and it is refused too, rather than saved and ignored.

Rates are dated and append-only. From decides which shifts it covers, and nothing you do here rewrites a shift that was already worked at the old rate — last month's payroll has already been run against it. There is no edit and no delete on a rate line, and the reason it stays is that it is evidence in a pay dispute.

Salary and flat rate cannot both be true: A salaried person has no book of hours to beat — flat rate and salary cannot both be true.

What each basis actually pays

Hourly

Clocked minutes at the rate that applied the day the shift started. Shop time counts.

Flat rate

The billed hours on the job — their share of the labour line — at their rate. Beat the book and they keep the difference; lose to it and they wear it. The clock does not enter into it.

Hybrid

Both are worked out and the larger is paid, compared job by job. The floor tops up every job it wins, and a job they beat is not netted off against one they lost.

Job by job is a deliberate choice rather than an implementation detail. Compared over a whole week, one good job quietly pays for a bad one and the guarantee stops guaranteeing anything. Compared per job, it cannot.

Shop time — the parts run, sweeping, the morning meeting — is the case people get wrong. On flat rate it pays nothing, because there are no billed hours on it, and the screen names those minutes out loud rather than folding them away. On hybrid it pays at the floor, which is most of the point of having one.

Two technicians on one job

By default a shared job divides by clocked minutes — the punches already say who was there and for how long, so a job with nothing set on it is not unsplit, it is split by the clock.

To overrule that, open the ticket and find the Labor split panel under the profitability panel. Each job lists the people who clocked to it with a box each, in whole percent, plus a Why you will thank yourself for later. Press Set split and the confirmation says where it lands: Labor split saved. The repair order's cost, the payroll preview and the technician report all read it.

The shares have to come to exactly a hundred. Anything else is refused with The shares add up to 99.0%, not 100%. A job's labor has to be entirely accounted for. Everybody who clocked to the job needs a share, even a zero one — leaving somebody out would make the split add up to less than the job — and you cannot give a share to somebody who never punched it.

The arithmetic is exact rather than nearly exact. Three people on a hundred dollars and a cent get 3334, 3334 and 3333 hundredths, and every division in the chain — the shares, the billed hours, the money — sums back to the whole. A person's share is then spread across their own punches, so a mid-job rate change cannot pay the same job twice, and a job that straddles two weeks divides between them without either week gaining or losing a cent.

The split panel is behind the time-clock key and contains no dollar figure anywhere, on purpose. A foreman can set the proportions without seeing anybody's money; somebody who can see the money cannot move the split it came from unless they also hold the clock key.

Setting a split does not restate history. A job on an invoice that is already paid keeps the cost that was frozen onto it.

The boxes are pre-filled with a whole-percent allocation that still totals exactly 100 — three equal shares arrive as 34, 33 and 33, not 33 three times, so pressing Set split without touching anything is accepted.

If a hand-set split stops covering everybody who worked the job, it is withdrawn rather than patched — nothing is guessed. The panel says so, and it shows you both ways out: the boxes with everybody in them, and Back to clocked minutes. That is the fix for the old version of this panel, which printed the sentence and drew neither control.

What a technician sees

On Time, at the bottom. Somebody with money visibility gets a card headed Payroll preview with a Cost column; somebody without gets exactly the same figures under Your pay with a Pay column and the line Your own pay is always yours to see, whether or not you can see the shop's money. Nobody else's is here. It is always and only your own record — there is no other-person view on that screen.

One row per rate segment, showing the rate with its unit — $42.00 / billed h flat rate · floor $28.00/hr — the hours clocked, the hours billed where they differ, and the money. Underneath, the awkward facts: hours with no rate on file, salaried hours, shop time that flat rate does not pay for, and jobs nobody has priced yet — not counted above, and not counted as zero either. If the guarantee earned its keep, it says so: The hourly floor was applied on at least one job — the book paid less than the guarantee there.