Last updated 19 May 2025

Salary Formulas

Every HR now offers you the ability to use your own, custom formulas alongside pay scales to calculate salary and FTE values. This functionality can be found on the ‘Salary Formulas’ tab on the Settings page for the Employees module.

The setup depends on whether you want to apply different formulas based on employee criteria or just change default formulas for teaching or non-teaching staff at your organisation.

Creating custom formulas

To create additional formulas, you must have set up entitlement groups first. Without entitlement groups turned on and set up, you will only be able to view and edit the pre-loaded, default formulas for teaching staff and support staff. For more on how to do this, please see our article on entitlement groups.

Step 1 - Go to the salary formulas tab

Head to the ‘Salary Formulas’ tab in the Settings area for the Employees module. The page includes the default formulas that Every HR uses to calculate FTE values, actual salary, hourly rates, and daily rates. The tables detail the separate default formulas for teaching and non-teaching employees.

Please note:

If your organisation links salaries to pay scales, then an employee’s FTE Salary will be inherited from the pay scale they are assigned to. This means the ‘FTE Value Formula’ will be the only way you will be able to further customise the calculation of an employee’s actual salary. Once salaries have been linked to pay scales, only FTE Value formulas will display on the ‘Salary Formulas’ tab.

Step 2 - Set up your own custom formula

To create a new formula, click the ‘Add Formula’ button under the appropriate table. This will launch a window for you to add your new formula. You will be prompted to fill out the details below:

Title - Give your new formula a name to identify it. This is a mandatory field.
Effective Start Date - This mandatory field asks you to select a day on and after which the formula will run. This is useful for setting up a new formula in advance of the date it goes live for your employees. The formula’s effective date cannot be earlier than the effective date of any entitlement group it is applied to.
Effective End Date - This field allows you to set a day on and after which the formula will stop being effective.
Formula - Build your custom formula in this field using the variables, digits and operations listed below.
Round - Prints a round function into your formula. The function must be entered as ‘round(x, y)’, where ‘x’ outputs the value to be rounded and ‘y’ indicates the number of decimal places the value should be rounded to, with ‘3’ being three decimal places and ‘0’ being the nearest whole integer. If you are looking to round a calculation, this should be within brackets, such as ‘round((a/b), y)’.
Test - Use this button to display fields where you can enter a given FTE Salary and FTE Value to test if the formula outputs the expected result.
Entitlement Groups - This is a mandatory field to connect your new formula to an entitlement group that you have already set up. Type into this field to search for the names of applicable entitlement groups and select the one from the list to add them. You can connect as many entitlement groups as needed.

Please note:

You must set an effective date for your salary formula which is after the effective date for any entitlement group it is associated with.

Step 3 - Save, edit and supersede formulas

Once you are happy that you have set up your formula correctly and filled out all the mandatory fields, click the ‘Save’ button to apply it. You will now be able to view it in the tables back on the ‘Salary Formulas’ tab. The table will display your new formula’s title, details of the formula itself, the entitlement groups it has been applied to, its effective start and end dates.

Use the icons in the action column on the right to supersede the formula, view a list of employees who the formula has been applied to, or remove the formula (by giving the formula an end date).

Superseding the default formulas

Every HR calculates salaries using a variety of default formulas, all listed on the ‘Salary Formulas’ tab on the Settings page for the Employees module. If you calculate salary differently by default, you can supersede these formulas with default formulas of your own.

Be aware:

This will change salary calculations for all employees who have not been assigned to a different salary formula through an entitlement group. Please be certain of the change you want to make before applying this in a live property.

Step 1 - Find the default formulas at your property

Use the icons in the action column on the right to supersede the formula or view a list of employees who the formula has been applied to.

Step 2 - Make your changes

Clicking to supersede the formula will launch the ‘Supersede Formula Calculation’ window. You will be asked to review the following fields:

Title - It is mandatory that your superseded salary formula is given a name you can identify it by.
Supersede From - This field asks you to select a day on and after which the superseded formula will apply. This is useful for setting up a new formula in advance of the date it goes live for your employees. This is a mandatory field.
Formula - Amend the existing formula in this field using the variables, digits and operations listed below.
Round - Prints a round function into your formula. The function must be entered as ‘round(x, y)’, where ‘x’ outputs the value to be rounded and ‘y’ indicates the number of decimal places the value should be rounded to, with ‘3’ being three decimal places and ‘0’ being the nearest whole integer. If you are looking to round a calculation, this should be within brackets, such as ‘round((a/b), y)’.
Test - Use this button to display fields where you can enter a given FTE Salary and FTE Value to test if the formula outputs the expected result.

When you are happy and completed all the mandatory fields, click ‘Save’ to apply your changes.

Frequently asked questions

What is an FTE Salary and FTE Value?

A full-time equivalent (FTE) salary is the salary an employee would earn if they were full-time as per their contract. An employee working full-time would therefore earn their full FTE salary, whereas a member of staff who works fewer hours than full-time would earn only a proportion of their FTE salary.

This proportion is known as their full-time equivalent (FTE) value, and is commonly calculated as:

(Employee’s contract hours/Employee’s full-time equivalent hours [FTE Hours])*(The weeks an employee is paid to work/Employee’s full time equivalent weeks [FTE Weeks]) = FTE Value

Therefore, an employee who works 40 hours per week and 26 weeks in the year on a contract that considers full-time as 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year, would receive an FTE Value of 0.5.

How are FTE Salary and FTE Value used to calculate salary?

To calculate a salary, the employee’s FTE salary is commonly multiplied by their FTE value.

FTE Salary x FTE Value = Salary

This way, if an employee’s FTE Salary is £30,000, and their FTE Value is 0.5, their salary will be calculated as £15,000.

When an FTE Salary is linked to a pay scale, using custom formulas to calculate an employee’s FTE Value gives an organisation greater flexibility over defining the actual salary of its employees.

Why do I have to set up entitlement groups to add my own custom salary formulas?

To create your own, custom formulas (in addition to the default formulas already set up on Every HR for teaching and non-teaching staff) you will need entitlement groups set up to determine which employees the custom salary formula will apply to.

Entitlement groups are a useful way to set criteria for whether an employee is eligible for certain ‘entitlements’, such as custom salary calculations, additional holiday weeks, or paid sick leave. To learn more, please see our entitlement groups article.