Sysarb can now compare employees who are paid in different ways — hourly, monthly and yearly — in a single, consistent view. The platform converts every salary to a common basis (this is called normalization) so that figures across the whole organization are directly comparable.

Two things follow from this. First, dashboard views — the Involve portal, the Global and Country overviews — now show combined salary KPIs across all salary types rather than one type at a time. Second, you can run a pay equity audit (PEA) on your whole organization in one chosen salary type, instead of running separate audits for hourly, monthly and yearly paid employees.

Different employees are stored with different salary types. An hourly-paid employee has an hourly rate; a monthly-paid employee has a monthly salary; a yearly-paid employee has an annual figure. On their own these numbers cannot be compared or averaged together.

Normalization converts them onto one basis. To do this the platform needs to know, for each employee, two things:

• Full-time working hours per month — the monthly hours that count as full time for the employee. This links an hourly rate to a monthly or yearly amount.

• Yearly payouts — how many salary payments the employee receives across a year. This links a monthly amount to a yearly amount.

With these two values set, the platform can express any employee’s pay as an hourly, monthly or yearly figure, and combine everyone into one comparable population.

Two fields have been added to the employee record. Both can be set when creating an employment, edited later, imported by file, and brought in through integrations.

Note on decimals: full-time hours and yearly payouts can be set as decimals, because some countries and agreements require it (for example a 38.5-hour week, or a part-year payout factor).

The table below lists every area touched by salary normalization and what changed in each. Use it as a checklist of where to expect the new fields and the new behaviour.

Previously the Involve manager and employee portals normalized salaries using the single default work-hours value from System settings. They now use the full-time-equivalent work-hours value stored on each employee. This gives a more accurate per-employee conversion where full-time hours vary across the organization.

On the Global and Country overviews, the salary-type selector used to filter the view down to employees of that one type. It now converts every employee’s salary to the selected type. Switching between hourly, monthly and yearly therefore shows the whole population expressed in that basis, not a subset of it.

When you start a pay equity audit on a selection that contains more than one salary type, the platform now asks which salary type the analysis should run in. It converts all included employees to that type, so a single audit can cover the whole organization. Inside the audit you can see which salary type was selected when it was created.

When the feature is released, your existing employees are migrated into the new format automatically. For any employee that does not already have the new values, the platform applies the current defaults from System settings. The same applies if you do not import a new salary file with the values: those employees are migrated on the defaults.

1. Check the defaults in System settings. Confirm the default full-time work hours and default yearly payouts reflect your organization. These are what the platform applies to any employee without a value of their own — including during the migration on 11 June.

2. Set the correct per-employee values where they differ from the default. For employees whose full-time hours or yearly payouts differ from the default — for example different collective agreements, contract types or countries — set the values on the employee record or include them in a salary file import so they are not migrated on the defaults.

The values are validated as positive numbers and accept decimals.

The platform converts between bases using the two employee values. In plain terms:

For example, an hourly rate is scaled up to a monthly figure using the employee’s full-time hours, and a monthly figure is scaled up to a yearly figure using the employee’s number of yearly payouts. The same factors are used in reverse to go the other way.

Because each employee can have different full-time hours and a different number of payouts, the conversion factor is not the same for everyone. That is correct and intended — but it has one consequence worth understanding, covered in the appendix.

Do I have to re-run my existing audits?

No. Existing audits are unaffected. The new behaviour applies to dashboards going forward and to new audits you create.

What happens if an employee has no full-time hours or yearly payouts set?

The platform falls back to the relevant default from System settings. This is why checking those defaults before 11 June is the most important preparation step.

Can I still look at a single salary type on its own?

Yes. Selecting a salary type now expresses the whole population in that basis; you are still choosing the basis you want to see. You can filter by the new fields where filtering is available.

Why did a pay gap change when I switched between hourly, monthly and yearly?

This can happen and is mathematically expected when full-time hours or yearly payouts differ between the groups being compared. It is not an error. The appendix explains why, with a worked example.

Are decimals really supported for full-time hours?

Yes. Both full-time-equivalent work hours and yearly payouts accept decimal values.

This section explains, with a small example, why a pay gap measured in monthly terms can differ from the same gap measured in hourly or yearly terms. The short answer: a pay gap compares group averages, and normalization rescales each person’s salary by a factor that can differ from person to person. When that factor differs systematically between the groups being compared, the gap changes with the basis you choose.

A pay gap is the difference between the average pay of two groups, expressed as a percentage. Normalization converts each employee’s salary using their own factor — full-time hours for hourly conversions, yearly payouts for yearly conversions. The key fact is this:

This is because the average of converted salaries is not simply the average salary multiplied by one shared factor — each salary is divided or multiplied by its own. Mathematically, the average of the ratios is not the same as the ratio of the averages.

Take four employees doing equal work, all stored as monthly salaries. The two groups have different full-time-hours definitions (for example, different collective agreements):

Converting each employee to an hourly rate (monthly ÷ full-time hours) and to a yearly figure (monthly × yearly payouts), then comparing the group averages, gives:

Read across the table: in monthly terms Group A is paid 2.5% more. In hourly terms Group B is ahead by 7.25% — the gap reverses. Nothing about anyone’s pay changed; only the basis did. Group B’s lower full-time-hours definition (150 vs 165) means their hourly rate is relatively higher, so the comparison looks different per hour than per month.

The yearly figure, by contrast, is identical to the monthly result (+2.5%). That is because every employee here has the same number of yearly payouts (12). A conversion factor that is the same for everyone leaves the gap unchanged.

The same logic applies to yearly payouts. If two groups have the same monthly salary but one group receives an extra payout across the year (say 13 payouts instead of 12), the monthly gap is 0% while the yearly gap is not — because the yearly conversion factor now differs between the groups.

• Differences between bases are expected whenever full-time hours or yearly payouts vary between the groups being compared. They do not indicate a data or calculation error.

• Choose the basis that matches the question. For statutory reporting that asks for an hourly figure, use hourly; for an annual comparison, use yearly.

• If a gap looks surprising on one basis, check whether the underlying full-time hours or yearly payouts differ between the groups — that difference is usually the explanation.

• Accurate full-time-hours and yearly-payout values are what make every basis trustworthy, which is why the preparation step matters.

Questions about this update? Contact your Sysarb advisor or our support team.