User:Mloc

Budget Management

The Head of Personnel is also responsible for the financial administration of the station which includes looking after the Station Budget, the station Payroll and even the crew's personel bank accounts.

The budget is divided into three categories

Name	Purpose	Who spends it	Who pays into it
Payroll	Paying the crew their hard earned salary!	Payroll system	Head of Personnel / Nanotrasen / Rockbox purchasers
Medical Research	Early GeneTek console research and this budget is also where credits are sent after a crewmate purchases a gene from the gene booth.	Geneticists	The crew
Shipping	Buying and selling all sorts of goods available in cargo.	Quartermasters	Quartermasters / The crew

The shipping budget is a little different as some Chief Engineers can get antsy if you start redirecting funds out of it without their consent.

Payroll Budget

Easily the most important aspect of the Head of Personnel's role in finance is ensuring the crew is paid on time. The payroll budget is unique in that it can only be manually withdrawn and deposited by those with access to the Bank Data computer. The payroll budget is naturally where the payroll is paid from, but if you've ever looked at the bank records computer you'd notice that it almost always starts at zero, and will almost always remain that way unless there's an unusually productive HoP actually doing their job. You might be wondering now, if the payroll budget is almost always empty then how does anyone get paid?! The answer is the payroll process.

Payroll Process

The payroll is paid approximately every five minutes from the start of the round. The first step, assuming the payroll was not suspended, is to deposit the payroll stipend into the payroll budget. The payroll stipend is sum total of the starting salary for each member of the crew for one payroll cycle. The next step in the payroll cycle to pay out the payroll into individual crew accounts. If during that process the payroll budget doesn't have enough left to pay the next salary the payroll system will automatically suspend the payroll which sounds out a station-wide announcement. The most common cause of automatic payroll suspension is when some foolish HoP has given the clown a salary increase without compensating for that in the payroll budget.

How to give someone a raise without suspending the payroll

In the unlikely event that one of the crew has distinguished themselves, or alternatively they are your target of some sort of elaborate financial prank, you may want to increase their pay. This is done simply by modifying their wage in the Bank data computer in customs, however in the next payroll cycle the payroll will be suspended if you don't do one of two things:

• Decrease one or more crewmate(s) pay by the same amount.
• Add the difference to the Payroll Budget.

Lets say for example you want to increase your own salary because why shouldn't you be paid twice as much as the captain who was murdered five minutes into the shift after agreeing to a fight to the death with a random staffie. Your starting salary as HoP is 1,200⪽ per payroll cycle, the captain's salary is 2,400⪽ so first uou would set your own salary to 4,800⪽ and then you would need to add 3,600⪽ to the payroll for each payroll cycle. If you expect the round to be 50 minutes long, that's approximately 10 payroll cycles therefore you will need to add 36,000⪽ from the CE's precious shipping budget, or some other dubious source, into the payroll budget to sustain the payroll.