Payroll does not always follow the same operational date. Some organizations pay based on when a service occurred. Others organize payroll around when work was entered or when documentation was approved.
SPI — Staff Pay Intelligence now supports all three approaches through its Work Selection Basis setting: Service Date, Date Added, and Approval Date.
One setting decides which pay period receives the work
Work Selection Basis determines which imported date SPI uses to place a work item into a pay period.
Service Date is the traditional option: work belongs to the pay period containing the date the service was performed.
Date Added lets an organization place work into payroll based on when the work or documentation was entered.
Approval Date lets an organization place work into payroll based on when the work or documentation was approved.
A service performed in September but approved in October can remain September work under Service Date—or become October payroll work when Approval Date is the organization’s selected basis.
Service Date is still the compensation anchor
Choosing Date Added or Approval Date does not replace the Service Date or rewrite the underlying service history.
SPI preserves the source dates separately. Service Date continues to control compensation-effective rules such as the applicable service rate, Staff-effective dates, and bonus economics. The selected Work Selection Basis changes period placement—not the underlying economics of the service.
That separation is important. An organization can align payroll timing with its own workflow without losing the date that represents when the clinical or billable service actually occurred.
Late Work follows the same rule
The selected basis also carries through to Late Work handling. SPI does not silently fall back to Service Date when the pay period uses Date Added or Approval Date.
If the selected routing date belongs to a finalized earlier period, SPI can identify the work against that period and carry it forward according to the existing Late Work workflow. If the required selected date is missing, the row is held rather than guessed into a different period.
More flexibility for real payroll structures
This gives organizations more room to match SPI to the way payroll is actually administered.
A team that pays from completed service activity can stay with Service Date. A workflow that waits for documentation entry can use Date Added. An organization that considers work payable only after review can use Approval Date.
The goal is not to create a complicated payroll rules engine. It is to let one clear Work Selection Basis choice answer a practical question: Which date should determine the pay period for this work?
See how SPI fits your payroll workflow.
Explore the SPI preview to see Staff Pay Intelligence in context, including pay periods, imported work, compensation rules, and the workflows around payroll review.
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