Paying Staff for Attending or Leading Training Clinics

How Training integrates with Timekeeping and considerations for using paid vs. unpaid clinics.

You may want to host training clinics and pay your staff for participating. This is particularly common for mandatory clinics like early-season orientations. Training does integrate with Timekeeping in order to allow this, but there are some key things you should know about how it behaves in order to decide the approach that works best for you.

Prerequisites for Using Paid Clinics

If you'd like to set up a paid clinic, the clinic type must be associated to a paid activity. To do this, see Timekeeping - Creating and Associating Paid Activities.

For a paid activity to generate for clinic attendees, they will also need to be scheduled for an on shift. If the attendee doesn't have a shift or is scheduled for an off shift, they will not appear in Timekeeping and therefore paid activities will not generate for them.

Keep reading to learn more about the two approaches to pay your staff for attending trainings: paying via paid clinics in Training and paying via paid tasks in Scheduling.

Attendees vs. Trainers

Creating paid clinics will generate paid activities for attendees, but not for the trainers themselves. Trainers will need to have a paid task placed on their schedule in order to have a paid activity generate for them.

Paid Clinics vs. Paid Tasks, Pros & Cons

Creating a paid clinic in Training is not the only way you can pay staff for attending a clinic. Similar to how you pay trainers for clinics via a paid task in Scheduling, you can do the same for attendees as well. This allows you to set all your clinic types up as "unpaid" and generate your paid activities from data in Scheduling instead. To help you decide how to set your site up, here's a breakdown of the pros & cons of using the paid clinic approach:

Pros of paying attendees out of Training

• Staff who register for clinics will only be paid if the trainer marks them as attended.

• If they are a no show, and marked as such by the trainer, then a paid activity will not generate.

Cons of paying attendees out of Training

• Anyone can sign up for a published clinic, but they need to be scheduled for an on shift in order to be paid. This can be difficult to manage as an admin - even if you are assigning people into the paid clinic, you'll need to keep track of the roster and schedule everyone for an on shift in Scheduling.

Pros of paying attendees out of Scheduling

• As mentioned above, clinic trainers can only be paid via tasks in Scheduling. Paying attendees in the same way keeps it consistent. And, because your attendees need to have on shifts in order for paid activities to generate, chances are you're looking at Scheduling anyway.

Cons of paying attendees out of Scheduling

• You have to manually apply tasks in Scheduling when your staff attend training clinics, which adds an extra step. To make this easier, you can use the pills shown in the screenshot below to quickly identify people who have attended or led trainings.

How Clinics Are Referenced Within Other Features

Both clinic attendees and trainers will have a pill appear on the timeline in both Scheduling and Timekeeping. The pill will differentiate between attendees and trainers: