Basic Garnishment Deduction Code

The simplest form of garnishment is a flat-rate garnishment that will be deducted from the payroll of the garnishee each pay period. To apply a flat-rate garnishment is straightforward:

a deduction code for the garnishment must be created if one does not already exist.
the deduction code must be inserted into the employee’s profile and initialized with the correct flat-rate.

The Basic Garnishment Deduction Code

The basic deduction code for a flat-rate garnishment usually has the following requirements:

The deduction code should run each pay period,
The deduction code should be the last deduction code to run during payroll processing. This is required so that statutory deductions are taken from the payroll before the garnishment amount is taken.

Let’s go over the steps to create the Deduction Code:

Insert a new Deduction Code from Canadian Payroll > Employer Payroll Tables > Deduction/Benefit Codes.
Setup the deduction code with a Code and a Full Name.

From the deduction data tab we need to setup the Short Name the Gen. Frequency, and the Calc. step fields of the garnishment:

1	The `Short Name` is printed on the Pay Statement of the employee exactly as entered.
2	The `Gen. frequency` controls on which pay periods the deduction will be applied.
3	The `Calc. step` controls during which step in the payroll calculation the deduction will be applied. We set this to `9` so that the garnishment is applied last (after the statutory deductions have been taken.)

The Gen. Frequency for the deduction code controls on which pay period the deduction will be applied. We want the garnishment to come off each pay period so we can leave it set to the default value of Every Pay Period.

Save and close the deduction code now by pressing OK.

How to use the basic garnishment deduction

Now that we’ve created a basic garnishment code we want to apply it to an employee to garnish their pay.

Let’s go over the steps to add the basic garnishment code to an employee.

Open the employee profile of the employee (Canadian Payroll > Employee Profile > Employee Profile).
Insert the basic garnishment code from the Deduction/Benefit Codes tab.
(This tab is located at Deduction/Benefits > Deduction/Benefit Codes of the employee profile.)

Change the Code Type to Deduct Only and setup the Amount and Remaining fields for the code.

1	Select the basic garnishment code that we just setup for the `Deduction Code` field.
2	The `Amount` field determines how much will be deducted from the employee payroll.
3	The `Remaining` field can be used to specify how much in total can be deducted from the employee over multiple pay periods. (By default this will be set to `9,999,999.99` which will process the deduction indefinitely.)

Example 1. Using the Remaining field

If the Amount is $200.00 and the Remaining is set to $650 the deduction will only occur four times:

Each pay period the remaining amount is decreased by the deduction amount until it reaches zero.
The last deduction will take the lesser of the Amount or Remaining for the deduction amount which will be $50 in this case.

Pay Period #	Deduction Amount	`Remaining` (after payroll processing)
1	200	450
2	200	250
3	200	50
4	50	0

Save and close the employee profile now.

If everything was setup successfully the employee will have the garnishment deducted from their payroll during each payroll.

It would be a good idea now to run a quick test pay run to ensure that the code is working as you expect.