Reporting
Turning a timetable into a payment report
The timetable already knows who taught what, when, for how long, on which programme and in which kind of session. Give it an hourly rate and it can tell your accounts department what is owed.
The idea in one paragraph
Nobody should be retyping a timetable into a spreadsheet at the end of a term.
Every teaching hour in Wise Timetable already carries the lecturer who delivered it, the course, the study programme it belongs to, the kind of session it is — lecture, seminar, laboratory, clinical, whatever your institution calls them — and the date it happened on. A payment report is that information multiplied by a rate.
The rates live in a small table you write once. Every lecturer has their own line in it, which is the point: in most faculties no two people are on the same contract, and a system that assumes one rate for everybody is of no use at all.
The rate table
One file, one line per lecturer, and it is deliberately plain text.
The file is called payments.txt and it sits in the program data folder. You do not have to go looking for it: the planner opens it from Settings → Miscellaneous → File Settings, where the button carries the file's own name.
A line is the lecturer's name, then up to fifteen rates, separated by semicolons. Each rate is a code and an hourly amount in brackets:
Novak Janez;LEC(42.00);LAB(31.50);SEM(36.00)
Horvat Maja;LEC(38.00);MED(55.00)
That is the whole format. It is plain text because it is the kind of thing a faculty secretary needs to be able to correct at four o'clock on a Friday without asking anybody.
What the fields mean
Fields are separated by semicolons. The first is the person; everything after it is a rate.
| Field | Example | What it has to be |
|---|---|---|
| First | Novak Janez | The lecturer, written exactly as the application writes the name — surname then given name, unless your school has set given name first, in which case that order. The match is on the name, so the table has to be kept in step with the lecturer list. |
| Second to sixteenth | LEC(42.00) | A code and the hourly rate for it. Up to fifteen per lecturer. Spaces around the code are ignored. |
| The code | LEC | Either the code of an execution type — the kind of session — or the code of a study programme. Whichever you set, the same string has to appear on the type or the programme. |
| The amount | 42.00 | Per school hour, in whatever currency the institution works in. The report does no conversion and no rounding beyond two decimal places. |
How a rate is chosen for one hour taught
The slot is converted into school hours
A lesson is held in the grid as a number of lines; the report converts that into the school hours your institution actually counts, using the segment length you have configured. Hours from bookings attached to the same course, kind of session and lecturer are added in, so a consultation slot booked against a module is paid like the module.
The kind of session is tried first
If the execution type of that session has a code, and that code is on the lecturer's line, the rate beside it applies. This is the ordinary case, and it is what lets one person be paid one amount for a lecture and another for a laboratory.
The study programme is tried second
If no execution type matched, the study programme's code is tried against the same line. This is how an institution pays by programme — a postgraduate programme at one rate, an undergraduate one at another — regardless of the kind of session.
Anything that matches neither is counted but not costed
The hour still appears in the lecturer's total. It simply earns nothing under any code, and the gap between the total hours and the sum of the money columns is how you find a code you forgot to set. The report does not invent a default rate, on purpose.
A session is counted once per day
Where the same slot reaches a lecturer twice over — two groups merged into one delivery, say — it is counted once, for hours and for money. They taught it once.
What comes out
A CSV, in one of two shapes.
The default shape is written to be read by a person. Each lecturer gets a block: their total hours for the period, the period itself, and then one column per code configured for them carrying the money accumulated under it. Below that the hours break down by study programme, and under each programme the individual dates, courses and kinds of session that made them up. A faculty can put that in front of a dean.
The flat shape is written to be read by a machine: one row per lecturer per session per date, carrying the name, the week, the day, the course, the kind of session, the hours and the study branches with their codes. It is the handover format for a payroll or accounting system that would rather do its own arithmetic. It is an advanced setting rather than a second menu item, and we will turn it on for you.
A lecturer with no line in the rate table is not omitted. They appear with their hours and without money columns, which is the right answer for somebody whose contract is not hourly and the obvious signal for somebody whose line is simply missing.
Producing one
Give your codes out
Put a code on each execution type where the rate depends on the kind of teaching, or on each study programme where it depends on the programme. You can do both; the type is tried first.
Write the rate table
Settings → Miscellaneous → File Settings, then the button named payments.txt. One line per lecturer who is paid by the hour.
Data → Export to CSV File → Personnel Record Report
The menu item is named for the record rather than for the money, because institutions that do not use rates use it for the hours alone.
Choose the period, and optionally one kind of teaching
Any range of dates, not only whole months. The same dialog can narrow the whole report to a single execution type, which is how you produce a claim for one category of work on its own.
Choose where to save the .csv
It opens in Excel and in LibreOffice with the separator and encoding your institution has configured, so it does not arrive as one column of semicolons.
What it is not, and we would rather say so here
It is not a payroll system. It produces figures — hours and money, by person, by programme and by kind of teaching — in a spreadsheet. There is no bank file, no tax calculation, no social contributions and no payslip.
There is no staff self-service claim form. A lecturer does not log in and submit a claim for approval. The report is produced by the office from what the timetable records, which some institutions prefer precisely because there is nothing to submit and nothing to dispute after the fact.
It costs hourly work. Anything in a contract that is not an hourly rate — a fixed annual allowance, a supervision fee, a head-of-department supplement — is outside it and belongs in whatever system holds the contract.
It counts what is in the timetable. Teaching that was delivered and never scheduled does not appear, which is an argument for keeping the timetable honest rather than an argument against the report.
The signed record, in the browser
A different document for a different purpose, and the one Slovenian faculties ask for by name.
Alongside the payment report there is an evidence of academic work sheet, produced in the web administration rather than on the desktop. It is printed for one lecturer at a time, for a month or for any period, and it splits what they did into teaching, consultations, colloquia, exams and other activities, with signature lines for the lecturer and for the office and a heading the faculty writes once and the system then remembers.
Slovenian institutions know it as Evalvacija, and it is named that way in Slovenian because that is the word they use in their own reporting. It is the same document under two names, and it is the one that gets signed.
Related
- Balancing lecturer workloadThe other half of the same data: how teaching is spread across staff before anybody is paid for it.
- Reports for university managementWhat a dean asks for, and which screen answers it.
- Moving from CELCATWhere this sits against CELCAT Pay Claim, which is a separate product there and part of the licence here.
Want to see this working?
Book a 45-minute online presentation and we will walk through it against your institution's own scheduling problem.