The Payroll Check Details table contains details about earnings and deductions for payroll checks. Each earning and deduction appears in its own record in the table. For a typical paycheck that has wages, federal income tax, state/provincial income tax, and other deductions, it's not unusual for there to be five to ten or more records for each employee for each paycheck. The problem is that when you report on fields in this table, each record is on a separate row. More likely, you want all the numbers for an employee's paycheck to be on one row with each earnings and deduction in its own column.

To make it easier to create this type of report, Stonefield Query has user-definable calculated fields that contain the amounts for certain earning and deduction types. For example, the Earnings Gross field contains the gross earnings amount and the Pension Employer field contains the employer portion of the pension deduction. Stonefield Query comes with several of these fields pre-defined, but you can edit those or add your own fields on the Payroll Fields page of the Options dialog.

Typically, you'll use these fields in a summary report. An example of such a report is Cdn Payroll Check Run Report by Department (for Canadian Payroll) or US Payroll Check Run Report by Department (for US Payroll). These reports have Summary report turned on so they don't show one row per earning/deduction but instead show one row per employee (or in these cases, per department) with a summary of each earning and deduction shown in columns of the report.