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How to set Meal contribution and deduction
How to set Meal contribution and deduction
Make an automatic monetary contribution, or deduction, to a shift for a meal allowance.
Patrick Gruhn avatar
Written by Patrick Gruhn
Updated over a week ago

🎯 For admins looking to integrate meal costs for employees.

Meal contributions, or deductions, can be set up to trigger automatically when a Shift exceeds a working time limit. This can ensure employees are compensated for meals or have a specific amount deducted from their payroll to cover meal costs.


How to setup Meal contribution and deduction

The first step is to create a Meal contribution and deduction rule that allows us to administer how much and how often this distribution must happen. Go to Settings > Payroll > Meal contribution and deduction.

Press Create to make a contribution or deduction rule.

Planday EN Screenshots for HC.002.png

Type - Select which rule you want to set up: a Meal contribution or a Meal deduction.

  • A contribution amount adds the specified amount to the employee’s pay.

  • A deduction amount removed the specified amount from the employee’s pay.


Amount - The Amount is the monetary value for the contribution/deduction, and this can be set to:

  • Hourly - applied for every hour of a shift.

  • Daily - used once a shift.

Required working time is the minimum working time needed, in minutes, for an employee to receive the contribution/deduction.

Salary code - Add an optional Salary code to quickly identify this in your payroll exports, and choose whether you want your deductions printed as a positive number.
⚠️ This depends on your payroll system's requirements, so please check the documentation of your integration provider.

Lastly, select when this rule should be valid from and to (optional).

For example, in the screenshot above, employees that work continuously for 360 minutes (6 hours) are entitled to a meal per shift. A meal is £5 per employee and should be deducted from their payroll. Therefore, their meal deduction rule will apply daily, after 360 minutes of required working time, for an amount of £5.


How to enable or disable meal contributions or deductions for individual employees

This can be done by editing the user profile and enabling or disabling the Meal contribution/deduction checkbox under the Personal details > Payroll section.

Planday EN Screenshots for HC.003.png

Meal contribution/deduction in payroll export

You can see the meal contribution/deduction in the payroll report. Start by generating a report under Payroll > Payroll export. Select the date intervals and employees on which you need to run the report and press Prepare report. The PDF report will show the Meal deduction quantity and the amount deducted per employee, as shown in the example below.

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