How Apex Crest works

Everything in Apex Crest hangs off four sections. Payroll is where you’ll spend most of your time — it’s the day-to-day workspace for a pay period. Bonuses handles one-off amounts that sit outside the normal commission and wage math. Performance tracks daily goals like service sales and guest counts — deliberately kept separate from pay, so a slow week never quietly changes what someone’s owed. Access is where you decide who else can approve payroll, and why.

A payroll group is a set of locations that get calculated, approved, and exported together — a single-location business has one; a growing group might split into a few. The location filter underneath only narrows the employee list you’re currently scrolling — it never changes the totals above it, which always reflect the whole group.

Below those, a row of pay periods lets you jump between past, current, and future periods. Each one carries its own status independently, so approving PP11 has no effect on PP12.

A new pay period opens in Draft. What you see there is live activity — real transactions, real hours — but none of it is payroll yet. Three actions move it forward:

Above the employee list sits a strip of summary tiles — your at-a-glance gut check before you dig into any one person’s numbers. Most tiles have an “Explain” link that opens the exact formula and source rows behind that figure, which is the fastest way to build trust in a number instead of just hoping it’s right.

The review grid is the heart of the Payroll screen: one row per person, with columns for their role, level, location, and the revenue behind their pay. Apex Crest is built to handle a mixed team in the same list — the grid below shows all three at once, using a fictional demo salon:

Each location has its own rule profile and its own commission plan — a ladder of levels, each with a default service-commission percentage. That’s what resolves an employee’s “Level · Rate” cell in the grid above. Every change here is effective-dated: nothing is silently overwritten, a new version simply takes effect from the pay period you choose, so you can always see what a rule used to say.

A payroll group bundles the locations that approve and export together, gives them a shared label and a connection to your payroll provider, and lets you set a color per location purely for quick visual scanning — that color is cosmetic and never touches an actual pay figure.

For each branch and pay period, import the wages & commission CSV, match employees, and compare its pay to a saved Apex revision. The report supplies employee tips to the next calculation.

A bonus is attached to one employee and one pay period, with a required business reason — that reason becomes part of the record shown in the review queue below it, so anyone looking back later knows exactly why the amount was added.

Performance tracks daily goals per staff member: service sales, retail sales, units sold, guests, new guests. A metric marked Provisional is still settling as later data arrives; one marked Goal not set simply has no target configured yet. Neither label affects anyone’s pay — this page answers “how’s the shop doing,” not “what does someone earn.”

Roles like “Payroll approver” are assigned to specific teammates, and Apex Crest requires a short written reason for each one — that pairing of who, what role, and why is what makes the active-roles list function as a real audit trail rather than just a permissions toggle.