KB01-022

Several mandatory sick leave policies are designed to give the employee 1 hour of vacation time for every certain number of hours worked. Although employers can exceed this, they cannot provide less. If you want to exceed this requirement or, your state law enables other types of accruals, there may be other setup options that would work better for you. Most mandatory sick leave laws require the employer provide 1 hour of accrued vacation time for every 30 hours worked; thus, our example will focus on earning 1 hour for every 30 hours worked.

The accrual schedule can be setup to use Every X hours/Calendar Year or Every X hours/Accrual year to determine the accrual. The accrual year can be either Hire, Adjusted Hire or Other date.  The system will use the Accrual Based on Date to determine the year.  We define X as 30 hours in the To Range. When using Every X hours/Calendar Year the Calculation Factor is now how many hours should I earn when I reach the To range amount. We defined this as 1 hour.

We have setup a Calendar year maximum of 24. You could use an Accrual year (Per Year – Variable) for the maximum as well. This maximum is different from an anytime maximum. The system will stop the accrual once the employee meets this maximum. In our example, if an employee met the accrual maximum of 24 hours in October the system would not accrue again until January, because we used a calendar year maximum in the setup.

Calendar Year Example

Accrual Year Example

Now that we have the accrual schedule setup, we can begin the Leave Code Setup. When picking the Leave Code name, keep in mind this name can be displayed on the check. The Leave Type is Accrual. We can assign the Accrual Schedule we created above to this leave code.

Accrual Based On can be hire date, adjusted hire date, other date or seniority date. If you use Every X hours/Accrual year and/or a maximum of per year-variable on the accrual schedule, the system will use the Accrual Based On date to determine a year. You can change this setting for specific employees at the Employee Leave Maintenance window. You could setup all existing employees with an accrual based on date of other and 7/1. Then, new hire employees can be set to adjusted hire date and the year would be defined from a hire date. This field does affect the years of service calculation on the Employee Leave Maintenance window. If you use Hire or Adjusted Hire date, the system will use the dates assigned at the Employee Leave Maintenance window.

 

The Effective Date is very important for this leave setup especially for existing employees with payroll history. The system looks at payroll history to determine hours from last week that should be included this week in the calculation. It determines which payroll to use by looking at transaction for a certain check date. You want to set the system to one day after the last check date when implementing. Let’s look at a few examples to determine the best date to set the effective date.

Employee hours and pay period information.

Hours worked	Pay Period Start	Pay Period End	Check Date
38.05	24-Jun	30-Jun	4-Jul
28.75	1-Jul	7-Jul	11-Jul
15.6	8-Jul	14-Jul	18-Jul
45.01	15-Jul	21-Jul	25-Jul

If the effective date was 7/1/2015 for the leave code, the first check run with the product is for July 11^thcheck date, the system would include the 38.05 hours from week 1 in the calculation. The system calculates the hours over the 30 hour increments. The 8.05 hours from last week are the hours that should be applied to this weeks calculation. For the July 11^th payroll the system will calculate 8.05+28.75 = 36.8 hours. Since the Employee worked 30 hours, the system will accrue 1 hour of sick time.

When we process the July 18 check the system would look at 38.05+28.75 = 66.80. Then use the 6.80 hours over the 30 hour increment to give us 15.60+6.80 = 22.4. Thus, the employee does not accrue sick time on this check.

When we process the July 25 check the system would look at 38.05+28.75+15.6=  82.4. Then use the 22.4 hours over the 30 hour increment to give us 22.40+45.01 = 67.41 total hours for accrual. The system would accrue 2 hours of leave time this pay period.

You might notice we have worked a total of 127.41 hours but have only accrued 3 hours not 4 hours. Since the first check was already processed when we started using Comprehensive Leave Manager, you would have needed to import the first 1 hour accrual or used the Calculate Leave Accruals window to accrue that first hour from the payroll which was already posted.

Maybe you do not want to include the 38.05 hours from the July 4^th check when you implement Comprehensive Leave Manager. You want to start accruing on the July 11 check for hours worked July 1 – July 7. In that situation, you want to use an effective date of July 5.  Then, when you run the July 11 check, the system will not look at any hours prior to July 5.

We can assign a waiting period to let the system determine if the accrued time would be pending or available. If an employee is within their probationary period, the system will enter the time in a pending status. In our example, we will use 30 days, we will discuss this further on the Employee Leave Maintenance window below.

If you have an any time maximum, you can enter the Maximum Balance Option of Fixed Amount or use a year of service schedule. The system will create a maximum balance adjustment anytime an employee exceeds this maximum.

We can now define what pay codes the system will use to calculate the hours worked. The system will not include hours in the calculation unless you include the pay code in the leave setup.

The taken pay code is used to reduce the balance on the leave code. When you process a taken pay code through payroll it automatically creates the taken transaction and reduces the balance. If an employee had 48 hours in the remaining balance for the leave code (essentially at the anytime maximum) and then took 8 hours off. The system would then see the new balance at 40 and let the employee continue to accrue again – assuming we have not reached our accrual maximum of 24 hours for the year.

Some state laws have requirements on the rate of pay for the taken time. Comprehensive Leave Manager does not calculate pay rates. The appropriate rate needs to be set on the Employee Pay Code Maintenance window.

Some state laws allow you to limit the hours an employee can take. For example, California enables an employer to cap the taken time at 24 hours a year. Comprehensive Leave Manager does not automatically calculate this cap. An approval process needs to be in place for management to approve the amount of time the employee can take. We do have a feature logged to notify payroll users when an employee would exceed the 24 hours taken in the year. If you would like to know if this features has been added or you would also like to request this feature, email Support@integrity-data.com.

The system can apply carryover at anniversary year, calendar year and other date or, not apply carryover. It will apply carryover when the carryover date crosses over the pay period start or end date. You can automatically apply carryover as part of the payroll process by marking the Apply Carry Over During Payroll Processing. You can apply it using the Calculate Leave Accruals window by marking the Apply Carry Over During Manual Processing. There is a third option, Apply Leave Carry Over Amounts utility window, which can be ran anytime regardless of the options marked on the leave setup window.   For more information on carry over review this KB article: https://www.integrity-data.com/blog/faq-items/how-do-i-apply-carryover-rules-with-comprehensive-leave-manager/ 

The last item to check is the Calculate Earned Time During Payroll Processing. This field enables the system to automatically calculate leave time during payroll based upon your setups.

We have now completed the setup of the leave code.

When we assign the Leave Code to the employee, there are a few employee specific fields to note. The Accrual Based on Date displays the employee specific Hire Date. If the Accrual Based on Date is changed to Other Date and 7/1/2015 is entered as the Accrual Based on Date then you will notice the years of service calculation will change. Since our accrual schedule is not based on years worked, rather hours worked, this does not affect the calculation.

The waiting period date is set to the employee Accrual Based on Date. The system will calculate the waiting period end date at 30 days after the Waiting Period Date displayed. The waiting period expiration for this employee would be 9/2/2015 (8/3/2015 plus 30 days).

If you use Waiting Period Unit of Date instead of days then the Waiting Period Date is the end date. In this example, we would enter 9/2/2015 as the end date on the Employee Leave Maintenance window.

If an employee was hired in 2013, they would not be in a waiting period status. Whereas, a new hire would be within the 30 day waiting period. If you use the Days as your Waiting Period Unit the system will automatically calculate and determine if the employee was in a pending/waiting period status.

At this time, the pending amount is not available to display on the check; however, by the end of August 2015 it will be available to display on the check. We are also adding Year To Date values on the check for Pending, Earned and Taken. You can review the KB article on adding leave time to the pay stub: https://www.integrity-data.com/faq-items/kb-adding-leave-codes-paystub/

The Accrued Through Date is another Employee Spec