Understanding Thirteenth Month

Posted on May 20, 2017 by Kieran Peppiatt

Thirteenth Month is a mandatory benefit that all employers in the Philippines need to provide to their rank and file employees who have been employed at their company for longer than one month. I put rank and file in bold as it’s fairly common practice to pay it to all employees, but that’s not mandated by the government. However, it has become traditional for employers to pay the benefit to all employees.

The Labor Code in the Philippines stipulates two distinct employee types. Managerial or Rank and File. The DOLE handbook says:

The Labor Code, as amended, distinguishes a rank-and-file employee from a managerial employee. A managerial employee is one who is vested with powers or prerogatives to lay down and execute management policies and/or to hire, transfer, suspend, layoff, recall, discharge, assign, or discipline employees, or to effectively recommend such managerial actions. All employees not falling within this definition are considered rank-and-file employees.

The above distinction shall be used as guide for the purpose of determining who are rank-and-file employees entitled to the thirteenth month pay.

It’s a pretty easy definition to digest. Anyone who makes managerial decisions or has the managerial powers described would be considered a managerial employee. Anyone who doesn’t is rank and file.

There’s three components to thirteenth month you should be aware of.

How much to pay
When to pay it out.
Over what period to calculate

In this article I’ll explain a bit about all three, and some ways you could consider approaching your thirteenth month calculations.

How much you should pay
The name does hint at what you should be paying. Your thirteenth month pay is roughly equivalent to your normal monthly take home. However, it’s not exactly the same. It’s also important to be careful if just paying out one month is your current formula. There is one scenario where this would mean you’re not compliant with the rules of 13th month, I’ll go into this below.

It’s also important to remember that the DOLE formula is the minimum amount you can pay. If you have a formula that pays your employees more than this, great! Looking after your employees is awesome, and having better benefits differentiates your company from others. This should ultimately help you attract the best talent.

The DOLE Formula

DOLE states that thirteenth month pay shall not be less than 1/12 of the total basic salary earned by an employee in a calendar year. Which is as simple as it sounds as long as you know what constitutes basic salary.

Basic salary is not base pay. Base pay is the monthly, hourly or salary rate that you detail in an employee’s employment terms. If you are not familiar with these terms, please read about the four components of payroll. It’s important to know what base pay is. Although they are not the same, it will be a key component of your calculation.

Let’s say you have a monthly paid employee who is contracted to earn 20,000 pesos a month. They work for your company for the entire year. That means their base pay for the year was 240,000 pesos. Even if your employee was absent during the course of the year, their base pay is still 240,000 pesos.

However, basic salary does adjust based on what you actually paid the employee. If the employee was absent one month, and you only paid them 15,000 that month their basic salary would be 235,000. You also would not include the following:

Benefits
Vacation Leave and Sick Leave paid out (these are a benefit)
Allowances (including COLA)
All Multipliers including overtime, night differential, holiday pay etc.

There is a caveat for this though. If you do include these as part of your basic salary through any agreements or company policies you should be including these in your 13th month calculations.

The Steps

Figure out the basic salary for each month.
Base pay for the month – any absences or base pay deductions = basic salary
Repeat for each month
Add all of the basic salaries for each month together
Divide the total amount by 12

The Gross Pay Formula

As mentioned above, as long as you pay your employees the DOLE minimum you will be covered from a compliance angle. However, there are better formulas you can use for both your payroll process and your employees. The gross pay formula is probably the easiest and fairest.

Gross pay is your base pay + any additional multiplier pay – absences and any other base pay deductions. Why this is so easy is because you already calculate this every payroll. Why this is good for your employees, is that although you are deducting their absences you’d also be giving them a portion of any multiplier pay as well.

The Steps

Add all of the gross pays for the year together
Divide the total amount

The Base Pay Formula

If you read my post about understanding benefits and allowances you will know that I believe simplicity in your payroll processes and policies is crucial to an streamlined payroll process. So the base pay formula is my personal favourite.

As you are not deducting any absences or base pay deductions you’ll be paying better than the DOLE minimum. It’s simple because there is only one step to this calculation.

The Steps

Divide the contract value of the employee’s base pay by 12.

Employee’s Most Recent Salary

I mentioned this briefly before, but some companies do just pay an additional one month’s salary to their employees. This is usually completely fine, and generally won’t cause you any problems.

If the employee earned the same amount of money each month during the year this is exactly the same as the Base Pay Formula mentioned above. If your employee received a promotion, and you pay them their most recent month’s salary you’ll be paying them more than a 1/12 of their year’s base pay.

The only time you need to be careful is if you were to give an employee a demotion or reduce their salary. Let’s say you’re employee earned 20,000 a year but in November you reduced their salary to 15,000. You then paid them 15,000 as their thirteenth month.

If that employee earned 20,000 for 11 months their base pay is at least 220,000 pesos for the year. If you divide that by 12 it would equal 18,333.33. Which means you will have underpaid your employee for their 13th month and not be compliant with what’s mandated by DOLE.

Other than that this is a perfectly acceptable way to calculate your 13th month.

The Steps

Pay your employee an additional month’s pay

Manually calculating or using excel
If you are not using an automated payroll system like PayrollHero and use, or intend to use, one of the calculations above that require you to calculate or the track a monthly amount. I would advise doing this calculation each month. It will save you a ton of time in the long run.

If you use excel, you will probably want a separate spreadsheet or sheet to track these amounts in. It doesn’t need to be complicated, just a simple tracker like the one below

If you intend to use multiple spreadsheets, check out the =importrange formula. You could have the 13th month amounts on your main payroll calculator spreadsheet for each month, and use this formula to make them appear in your 13th month tracker.

When to pay 13th Month
When to pay dictates the period you should be calculating for. This is why we need to clarify this point first. The DOLE handbook is explicitly clear about when you need to pay it out.

“The thirteenth-month pay shall be paid not later than December 24 of every year. “

Example, if your pay period is the 1st – 15th, 16th – 31st and you pay out 15 days after the pay period ends. You would need to pay this out no later than the 16 – 30 November payroll.

Why? Because the payout date for 1 – 15 of December would be the 30th of December, which is 6 days past the deadline.

So be careful, it’s not the pay period that matters here but when your employee receives the money that’s important.

You are also allowed to pay out the 13th month twice a year. Instead of paying the value of 12 months in December you could pay the value of 6 months twice.

What period should be used for calculating?
This is probably the part that causes most companies problems. You’re supposed to pay 13th month for the previous year, and the DOLE handbook does use the term calendar year when describing the 13th month.

But how can you pay 13th month accurately for the calendar year if the year isn’t even finished? Remember we have to pay it out on the 24th of December, which in a best case scenario is at least one payroll before the end of the year. You can’t, it’s not possible.

But, most companies do pay 13th month based on the calendar year of the current year. So what this means is they guess the last part of the year. You should not guess when it comes to payroll.

So what do we do instead? We need to pay for the calendar year and it has to be out before the 24th of December. Don’t worry, the important part here is that the DOLE handbook actually says a calendar year.

So let’s say your pay period is 1st – 15th and 16th to 31st. You pay out your payroll on 7 days after the pay period ends. In this scenario you could pay out your 13th month on the 1st to 15th of December payroll as it would be received by your employees on the 22nd of December.

If this was the case, the calendar year you should be using is 16 December of the previous year to 15 December of the current year. This means you will never be guessing with your 13th month pay out.

Maybe your dates are different than the ones I mentioned above. To figure out the period you should use just apply the following:

The day after the end of the pay period you payout of the previous year to the last day of the pay period you pay out of the current year.

Separated and Resigned Employees
It is quite shocking how many employers aren’t aware that they are liable for the 13th month an employee has accrued during their employment. Regardless of whether an employee still work for you at the end of the year or not, you still need to pay their accrued 13th month.

The important word their is accrued. You should pay them 1/12 of their basic salary for that period. If you use the base pay or gross pay formulas mentioned above, these will still work with no change required.

How to payout 13th month
The last thing I have to say on 13th month is about how you pay it out. So many companies pay it out separately to the their usual payroll cycle. This is totally acceptable but an unnecessary complication.

The only thing DOLE says about paying it out is the deadline on which it is received. I’d thoroughly recommend paying it out as part of your usual payroll cycle. Doing otherwise will usually lead to more resources being spent on payroll than necessary, and more bank charges for transferring the payment. If you think about the amount of time and effort that goes into one pay cycle, by removing the off-cycle element of 13th month you will free up your team to focus on more important items.

In Closing
Thirteenth month doesn’t need to be complicated. Use a simple formula, use a reporting period that is based on facts, and pay it out on time as part of your normal payroll. If you do this, you’ll remove a lot of the headaches and stress from your payroll process, and save a ton of work around the year end.

The Four Components of Payroll

Posted on May 13, 2017 by Kieran Peppiatt

As part of the HR and Payroll 101 series I wanted to take a closer look at the individual parts of the payroll process. Generally, there are 4 components to any payroll process, and this is usually country agnostic.

If you have ever been involved in payroll generation this number probably seems quite low. You could pick up any employee’s payslip and list maybe 10 items from their payroll alone, and your not wrong. However, this is part of the problem.

Most payroll admins structure their payroll process around the tax status of the items being credited or debited, or based on the individual line items themselves. These approaches can work, but they won’t be the most efficient. They will lead to unnecessary repetition, and increased resource requirements to administer. By knowing the four components, and how your payroll items fit into each, you will be able to apply your knowledge to streamline your overall payroll process.

Gross Compensation

Gross compensation is probably the easiest to understand. It’s any item that makes up your employee’s basic compensation package.

The first item is base pay, which is just one aspect of the overall gross compensation. However, this is usually the bulk of any employees payroll. There’s generally 3 main types of gross pay:

Salary: Employees get paid the same fixed amount each payroll regardless of their attendance
Monthly: This is similar to salary. Monthly paid employees also get an amount each month but it’s not fixed. It will fluctuate based on their attendance. For example, they may receive less gross pay if they come in to work late and more if they worked overtime.
Hourly: Employees are paid for the exact hours they work. So if you were being paid $1 an hour and worked 100 hours you would receive $100 as your gross pay.

Other notable mentions for base pay would be daily rates and piece meal. The former being employees who get paid per day and the latter per item they complete.

Overtime is usually paid at a premium to employees. The standard practice is to pay overtime at a certain percentage of the base pay rate. E.g. 125%. So if you were paid $10 an hour and then worked overtime you would get $10 multiplied by 125% which equals $12.50.

For other multipliers, these work in the same manner as overtime but are applied in different scenarios. For example, it’s not uncommon in most countries to provide additional pay to employees if they come into work on a public holiday.

In the Philippines the rate is 200%. So the same $10 base rate would be $20 on a regular holiday. This is also why we call them multipliers, because you multiply the scenario percentage by the base rate.

One thing to note, some companies don’t multiply but actually do addition. In the UK where there is no government mandated rate for working overnight. It’s not uncommon for employers to pay an extra £1 or £2 for work done late at night. These would also fall into this category.

The last one, and this depends on your companies process would be leave pay. If you don’t pay these out as separate line items they will be part of the base pay and so therefore part of the gross compensation. This is far more common with monthly and salary paid employees than any other type.

Recurring Items

“The important thing to remember is these items will be credited or debited from an employee on a strict schedule. Either for an ongoing period of time or in perpetuity”

From this point on, the component descriptions I provide are not exhaustive lists. You potentially have other payroll items that you provide that will fall into one of the four components.

Recurring items are those other payments that you credit or debit to employees every payroll. This might be for a preset period of time or in perpetuity.

It’s important to clarify that the amounts of these recurring items may vary from payment to payment.

A great example of this would be the Cost of Living Allowance in the Philippines. It’s a government mandated allowance saying that all minimum wage employees should receive 15 pesos for each day worked. So the amount paid out will always fluctuate based on the amount of days worked in the pay period, but it’s always paid each pay period.

Usually all allowances are recurring items, the frequency may change (either per payroll, per quarter, per month etc.) but they are consistently deducted on the same schedule.

Loan payments are another great example and illustrate how the payment doesn’t need to be deducted forever. Usually, if you give an employee a loan, they pay it back over X pay periods until the original amount is repaid.

Subsidized benefits are a huge catch all. Companies will give their employees certain benefits where the company covers most of the cost. However, the employee needs to contribute some amount. These are consistently deducted every payroll and continue until the employee either leaves or decides they don’t want to avail of the benefit any longer.

As mentioned, this isn’t an exhaustive list. The important thing to remember is these items will be credited or debited from an employee on a strict schedule. Either for an ongoing period of time or in perpetuity.

Ad hoc Items

“These items are infrequent, and the amount always vary. They are not deducted or credited to an employee each payroll.”

Ad hoc items are those infrequent payments that you have to make on payroll. Adhoc is a latin phrase that means “for this.” When you are doing something on ad hoc basis you are doing it for that specific case and no other.

Adjustments are a great example of an ad hoc item. Every time you do an adjustment you are making it to fix a specific error or issue. You are making the payment for this specific scenario.

Expenses would also come under this category, every expense payout is done for a particular expense or expense report. These are always handled on a case by case basis.

Sure you may have employees that submit an expense report with some frequency. You might have an employees who do a lot of driving for work and are allowed to claim their miles back on expenses. They may even submit an expense claim form every month.

However, if that same employee ended up working at head office for the entire pay period and didn’t drive any where they wouldn’t receive a mileage expense. Whereas if they received a car allowance, which is a recurring item, they would still receive the amount.

For breakages and spillages, in the food and beverage industry it’s not uncommon to charge the server if they break a plate, glass, etc. Again, these types of payments are always made for the specific incident.

Finally, Vacation Leave and Sick Pay would live here if you don’t include them in the gross pay. This might seem counterintuitive to you, but again think about the format we have established. Employees take leaves on an ad hoc basis, and when you pay their leave pay it’s done for a specific leave request.

Again, this list is not exhaustive and it’s important to note you might and probably do make these types of payments EVERY payroll. However, they usually won’t be to the same employees, and for the same amounts. Don’t get me wrong sometimes an employee might break the same glass or claim the same amount of miles so their amounts are the same, but this is because of circumstance and not because they are recurring items.

Just remember, these items are infrequent, and the amount always vary. They are not deducted or credited to an employee each payroll.

Government Deductions

Finally we have government deductions, and you know what they say; “there’s only two things in life that are certain; death and taxes.” Unless your employees are based in countries that don’t tax lower wage earners this is definitely true.

The other government deductions will vary based on your location. In the Philippines this would be Pag-IBIG, SSS, Philhealth. Singapore have charitable deductions and CPF. The UK has national insurance and Canada EI and CPP etc.

Most, if not all, governments have their own mandated deductions that employers have the responsibility to deduct. It’s vitally important to ensure you make these deductions on time and in line with your local laws.

So that’s the four components. Gross Compensation, Recurring Items, Ad Hoc Items, and Government Deductions. If you are designing your own payroll process, or trying to improve your current one categorize your payroll items into these four areas. Once done, you will be able to create processes for each component that will allow you to streamline your process.

For any questions, please ask in the comments below. Thanks!

Introducing Leave Accruals

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Kieran Peppiatt

… and a special offer just for you.

We’ve recently released a new feature to our Leave Management Add On.

Now you can automatically increase the leave balance of your employees.

How does it work?

It’s really simple to use. You select your frequency

and enter how many days you want the leave balance to increase by.

And that’s it. Really simple, super powerful automation for your employees leave balances.

Special Offer

To celebrate the launch of the Leave Accrual system. We are offering a 50% discount on our Leave Management Add On.

For a limited time only, you can add leave management to your account for only $2 per employee per month

What can the leave management add on do?

Even before the addition of leave accruals our leave management add on was pretty powerful. Here’s a taste of how it can help your business.
Your team can decision requests inside PayrollHero
You can customize the types of leaves you provide
Fully supports half-day leaves
Manage leave balances
View all of your employee’s upcoming leaves
View all of your employee’s leave history
Request and approve past leaves (great for when an employee has had to call in sick)

All of these great features are integrated directly to your existing PayrollHero account. Any requests approved will automatically appear inside PayrollHero!

If you have any questions about leave accruals, or are interested in taking advantage of the special offer please contact support@payrollhero.com

Understanding Benefits and Allowances

Posted on May 4, 2017 by Kieran Peppiatt

HR & Payroll 101: Understanding Benefits and Allowances UPDATED: Jan 2018 to reflect TRAIN.

Interested in PayrollHero? Sign up today and get 90 days free! – USE PROMO CODE 90UBABP2018

If you are in HR and Payroll you probably already appreciate how daunting a subject benefits and allowances (B&As) can be in the Philippines. What are you allowed to pay? What benefits are De Minimis or have a tax shield? Why are their multiple columns on the Alpha List for benefits?

It can be even more overwhelming if you are new to Philippine payroll. Whether you’re starting your payroll career, or you’ve recently opened a new business in the Philippines the learning curve can be pretty steep.

At PayrollHero we have a ton of experience helping customers decide what benefits they should give their employees and helping them create the policies that govern them.

What are Benefits and Allowances?

Usually employee benefits are not actually cash. They are the additional non-cash incentives you would provide to your employees over and above their salary compensation. However, in the Philippines the line has been blurred by De Minimis benefits. That said, let’s take a very quick look at the history of De Minimis benefits.

Historically they were in fact incentives provided over and above cash compensation. The rice subsidy was, and still can be, an actual 50kg bag of rice given to the employee each month. Employers can choose to provide uniforms or pay a uniform allowance. At some point, DOLE allowed the cash equivalent of the 50kg bag of rice to be paid to employees instead of the employer having to provide the actual rice.

My guess, they made the change because of the logistical nightmare companies faced trying to distribute bags of rice when operating multiple locations or employing large numbers of people.

As for allowances, they are a type of benefit. They are an amount of money you give to employees for a certain purpose. When we are talking about employees, allowances are always benefits but benefits are not always allowances.

General Best Practices

Before I go on, let me say, if you currently provide B&As to your employees and don’t adhere to the principles below, don’t panic. If it works for you then great! This is meant to inform your policy creation, not dictate it. You will know better than I what is right for you and your employees.

The KISS Principle

Honestly, in my opinion, this doesn’t only apply to B&As but everything in life. KISS stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid. The principle was originally conceived by the US Navy in the 1960s and, yes that’s right, I kind of just called you stupid 😛 .

The US Navy originally created the principle for their design process when creating new seafaring craft. At it’s core, KISS is about removing unnecessary complexity when designing something new.

I get it, you’re probably thinking, “well that’s all good and well, but I’m not trying to design an aircraft carrier.” Of course not, but even though you might not think of your benefits and allowance policies as “design” work we are still creating something new.

I mention this because a lot of employers, and especially new ones, have a tendency to create complex policies for B&As. A great example of this is COLA. COLA stands for Cost of Living Allowance and is a Department of Labour and Employment (DOLE) mandated benefit.

DOLE says that COLA should be paid at 10 pesos a day to non-agricultural minimum wage employees. It should also be paid to the same employees on regular holidays even if they don’t work the holiday, or if they take a paid leave.

To me that’s a pretty simple policy for you to add to your HR manual.

Example: “A Cost of Living Allowances (COLA) of 10 pesos per day will be provided to all minimum wage employees. COLA will be paid on Regular Holidays even if the employee is not scheduled to work. COLA will also be paid to any minimum wage employee on paid leave.”

However, a lot of employers try to incentivize or penalize the benefit. They want the amount to fluctuate if the employee is late/early to work, get extra if they work overtime etc. So, why is this a bad thing?

First of all, penalizing COLA might actually mean you are not following the rules DOLE have outlined. It clearly states you need to pay 10 pesos of COLA a day to minimum wage employees. There is no provision in the handbook that says “You can pay less if the employee is late to work.” So from a compliance angle this may cause you problems.

Secondly, you are creating additional administrative work for your payroll department. It’s a much easier for them to count the amount of days an employee has worked, than have to look at the attendance of each day and calculate individually what amount they need to pay. The former is 1 calculation per employee per payroll, the latter is 15 per employee.

Now, this might seem insignificant if you are just starting a company, but it will become more apparent at scale. Let’s say that the calculation takes 15 seconds for your payroll department to compute, and you have 100 employees. For the simple COLA calculation that would take your payroll team 25 minutes to compute. Whereas the complex calculations could take a little over 6 hours.

Even if you never plan to have a lot of employees, wouldn’t your employees time be better spent focusing on higher value work?

You might be reading this article as an existing HR or Payroll Admin. Have you been trying to figure out why your payroll process is taking you so long to complete? Think about your current payroll process, do you have unnecessarily complex policies that require you to do a ton of manual computations?

And sure, you could get a system like ours that allows you to automate a lot of your allowance calculations, however there is still an overhead required in having to support these policies with your employees. Overly complicated policies create more questions. If an employee sees an amount on their payroll that they don’t understand they are going to call your HR team to try and understand how you arrived at that amount.

ContactBabel conducted a study of services calls to contact centres in the US. The average call duration was 6 minutes per call. Even if only 10% of your employees are confused that’s potentially two hour of lost time per payroll or 52 hours per year. How did I arrive at those numbers? Remember, an internal phone call requires two of your employees to be on the phone. If your employees have to call HR that’s lost time that they could have spent focusing on working on your business.

More is Less

So how do we practice KISS but still provide a comprehensive benefits package to our employees? We can do this by providing more simplified benefits to employees. Let’s revisit the complex COLA above.

We wanted the COLA amount to fluctuate if the employee is late/early to work, get extra if they work overtime etc.

This might surprise you but there is potentially 3 different policies here, and one of them isn’t a benefit!

Fluctuate if the employee is late: This should be a separate attendance policy (it’s not a benefit) that states how you penalize employees for not arriving to work on time.
Fluctuate if the employee is early: It would be best to have a separate policy that stipulates how you reward employees for arriving on time.
Get extra if they work overtime: You may want to update your overtime policy to have a clause for minimum wage employees or a separate overtime policy for minimum wage earners.

This will make your HR policies easier to understand for everyone. This means training new HR and Payroll team members will take less time, there will be less questions from employees and your HR policies will be easier to maintain.

I’m in no way saying give less to your employees, I’m advocating to structure it in a way that is simple and makes sense. It will lead to better transparency and happier employees. It will also be a lot easier to scale.

De Minimis Benefits

Ok, so now we’ve outline what benefits are, and the general rules for creating the policies around them. Let’s take a quick look at the specifics of what the government already stipulates for you in the Philippines.

The government consider the following to be De Minimis benefits:

10 days monetized unused vacation leave credits;
Medical cash allowance to dependents of employees not exceeding P750 per semester or P125 per month;
Rice subsidy of P1,500.00 or one-sack of rice per month;
Uniforms and clothing allowance not exceeding P5,000.00 per year;
Medical benefits not exceeding P10,000.00;
Laundry allowance of P300 per month;
Employee achievement awards in the form of tangible personal property other than cash or gift certificate, with an annual monetary value not exceeding P10,000 received by the employee under an established written plan;
Flowers, fruits, books or similar items given to employees under special circumstances, e.g. on account of illness, marriage, birth of a baby, etc.
Daily meal allowance for overtime work not exceeding 25% of the basic minimum wage.

The De Minimis Benefits are a great place to start if you are trying to figure out how you can reward your employees over and above their standard salary package. This is because the government endorses these benefits and provides tax shields specifically for them.

Taxes

Why do we need to discuss taxes? I’ve already included the exemption amounts above right? Yes, if you keep your allowances below the amounts above you will have no complications calculating taxes, but there is a bit more to how taxes and benefits work together. As with most aspects of Philippine payroll it’s not completely black and white.

In the Philippines the De Minimis Benefits are the only benefits that are allowed to be provided to employees tax free. Any employer can provide these to their employees and not deduct taxes up to the amounts mentioned above.

However, employees in the Philippines also have a general tax exemption for “13th month and other benefits”. Currently you are allowed to pay employees 90,000 pesos a year under 13th month and other benefits without deducting taxes.

Contrary to popular belief the “other benefits” is not a blanket catch all for any other benefits you decide to give to your employees. It’s actually for the De Minimis Benefits mentioned above.

Let’s use an example to illustrate this. Timmy is our Rank and File employee. The company he works for gives him 2,500 a month as a rice subsidy and he received 25,000 pesos for his 13th month this year.

When we are doing Timmy’s end of year benefit tax calculations they might look like:

Government Rice Allowance: 1500 x 12 = 18,000
Rice Allowance paid to Timmy: 2500 x 12 = 30,000
Rice Allowance overage: 30,000 – 18,000 = 12,000

De minimis Benefits = 18,000
Non-taxable 13 month and other benefits = 25,000 + 12,000 = 37,000

However, let’s say Timmy actually received 80,000 in 13th Month and the same 2,500 a month in rice subsidies. His calculations would look like:

Government Rice Allowance: 1500 x 12 = 18,000
Rice Allowance paid to Timmy: 2500 x 12 = 30,000
Rice Allowance overage: 30,000 – 18,000 = 12,000
General Tax Shield overage = 92,000 – (80,000 + 12,000) = -2,000

De minimis Benefits = 18,000
Non-taxable 13 month and other benefits = 90,000
Taxable 13th month and other benefits = 2,000

Timmy will have to pay tax on the 2,000 pesos that he received over his 90,000 general tax shield.

Now in our example Timmy was a rank and file employee. This means he only pays the regular income tax rate on any benefits that exceed his 90,000 tax allowance. If Timmy was a managerial employee he would be subject to a fringe benefit tax. Currently the fringe benefit tax is 32%.

What is best for your employees?

As I mentioned at the beginning, you need to make decisions about your compensation package that is right for your business and it’s employees. Different employees have different needs. A 30 year old mother of two has far different needs to an 18 year old fresh grad. Ultimately, you want to make sure you are listening to what your employees want and juggling that with the resources you have at your disposal.

My hope isn’t that this article will change the benefits that you offer your employees, but it will alter your approach when structuring them. Just remember:

Simple policies are easier to maintain, deliver to employees, easier to process and will save time & resources.
Instead of having fewer complicated benefit policies try and have more simpler ones.

I think if you adhere to these two rules when creating your compensation packages you will be able to provide your employees with everything you want to, but in a way that makes the administrative aspects far easier to maintain.

Please let me know if you have any questions in the comments below. Thanks!