Agreement Hierarchy

Rates and Rules uses the concept of an agreement hierarchy to organise pay and bill agreements and to determine if specific agreements are applicable to job orders. When a pay or bill agreement is configured in Rates and Rules, it is assigned to a level of the agreement hierarchy. This identifies what the agreement applies to.

Each level of the agreement hierarchy is listed and described below, in order from the highest level to the lowest level.

Hierarchy Level	Description
Country	Country to which agreement applies.
Brand	Agency brand to which agreement applies.
State	State or province within a country to which agreement applies.
Region	Geographic region within a country to which agreement applies.
Office	Agency office to which agreement applies.
Parent Client	Parent company of client to which agreement applies.
Client	Client to which agreement applies.
Client Job Template	Client's job template to which agreement applies. This level of the hierarchy is available only when processing back pay.
Cost Centre	Client cost centre to which agreement applies.
Employment Type	Employment type to which the agreement applies (for example: full time, part time).
Payee	Payee to which the agreement applies.
Job Order	Job order to which agreement applies. This level of the hierarchy is available only when processing back pay.

Pay and bill agreements are assigned to job orders via the Assign Pay and Assign Bill Agreement screens in Recruitment Manager respectively. The agreements that are listed within these screens, and that the user can therefore apply to the job order, are filtered to include only those agreements that are applicable to the job order. Whether an agreement is applicable to a job order is determined by the agreement hierarchy value that applies to the agreement. For example, if an agreement is assigned to the country level of the agreement hierarchy with a hierarchy value of Australia, the agreement is applicable to any job order that belongs to the country of Australia.

The list of applicable agreements is also sorted in order of most specific to least specific. An agreement that is assigned to a lower level of the agreement hierarchy is considered more specific than one that is assigned to a higher level of the hierarchy. For example, a job order belongs to the country of Australia and is filled by a payee named John Smith. An agreement exists at the country level of the agreement hierarchy for the country of Australia and another agreement exists for the payee John Smith. The list of available agreements will therefore list both these agreements, with the payee-level agreement listed first as it is the lowest-level agreement and is therefore considered most specific to the job order. Only one pay agreement and one bill agreement can be assigned to a job order and the user assigning the agreements can select the appropriate agreement from the list as necessary.

Some rules or conditions of an agreement must also be assigned to a level of the agreement hierarchy and a hierarchy value at the assigned hierarchy level. An example of this are pay rate rules within a pay agreement, which must be assigned to a hierarchy level to determine the pay rate rule of an agreement that applies depending on the categories that apply to a job order. Where there are multiple rules defined at different levels of the agreement hierarchy, Rates and Rules applies the lowest-level rule that is valid.

Where a rule or condition of an agreement must be assigned to a hierarchy level, the rule/condition can only be assigned to a level that is lower than that to which the agreement itself is assigned.
Wherever an object can be assigned to a hierarchy level within Rates and Rules, you can search for and select the corresponding hierarchy value via a Search Hierarchy dialog box.