LEAVE MANAGEMENT (More Information)

The Leave calendar is a very popular tool that is available to staff that shows a full year's booked and pending leave in one simple view. When planning leave staff can see at a glance where leave has already been booked by their colleagues. By placing the mouse over the days in the calendar a tooltip/popup message will show how many staff have booked leave on a particular day and what type of leave it is (i.e. A/L, LSL, TOIL and so on). Note: That user defined colours are used to differentiate the leave types at a glance (i.e Annual Leave=Green, Sick Leave= Yellow, Public Holidays=Purple and so on). In busy leave periods such as long weekends and New Year holidays, staff can see how many people have booked leave and quickly make decisions on whether or not to submit a leave request. Additionally, you can have custom rules for example allowing a maximum of staff to be on leave at one time (i.e. a maximum of 4 people can be away on any given day of the year). You can also "black out" certain date ranges to manage business demand periods. From an HR perspective the calendar can be "filtered" to show certain leave types (i.e. Sick Leave), as well as certain staff, certain departments, or even the whole company. [Top]

Custom leave rules are a powerful feature that allows you to add your business's rules directly into the heart of the leave process enabling PSG Payroll™ to closer “fit” your company's leave policy. For example, one of our standard rules will not let staff to “overdraw” their leave and go into a negative balance. However this behaviour can be changed using custom leave rules so staff can overdraw one, two etc weeks of leave if desired. Furthermore, you can add a custom “OK”, “Cancel”message advising staff that they are over drawing leave and if terminated will have to pay back the overdrawn portion of the leave. Furthermore, rules can be added to reject certain leave (i.e. Annual Leave) if the application date is within a certain amount of time from the current date (i.e. reject all annual leave within 3 weeks of the published roster). However, in certain cases you may want to override these rules (i.e. PSG Payroll™ “super” users will get the same “reject” message as staff but will have the option to “Click OK to continue or CANCEL to exit” Additional custom leave rules that some of our customers are using are:

Rejecting SLNC (Sick Leave No Certificate) if the day falls either side of a weekend, day off, or public holiday.

Only allowing 5 SLNC days per DOJ (Date Of Joining) anniversary

Not allowing leave such as Annual Leave, TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) to be taken within 6 months of their DOJ
Utilising custom leave rules will allow “smart” automation of your company's leave management policies. [Top]

The Leave Balance Ledger, is a very “visual” tool that lets staff view historical and future leave increases, accruals, leave consumption information with a running balance total at a glance. By entering a future date into the leave “projection” calculator the ledger will display the available balance taking into account pending and booked leave. The Leave Balance Ledger utilises colours to differentiate between pending leave, booked leave, accruals, increases and so on. PSG Payroll™ allows up to 7 years of Leave Ledger information to be accessed online. Empowering staff with a “visual” view of their historic and future leave transactions will result in staff being able to better plan their leave, reducing the number of leave balance queries to payroll admin staff and facilitate better roster planning. [Top]

As with the Custom Leave Rules, the leave approval process can be customised to best suit your business processes. From a simple process such as staff entering their leave directly into timesheets, to one over one approval where the manager approves employee's in their team, to a more complex model where the manager may recommend the approval to a second or even third tier approver. An example of this might be that the HR department are required to approve certain leave types once the appropriate manager/s have given their approval/s (i.e. staff may require an extended absence of Sick Leave or Long Service Leave must be approved by the Regional manager). The approval process is flexible enough that each different leave type such as Annual, Sick, TOIL and so on can be driven by different approval processes. The work-flow is managed in two areas, internally via the PSG Payroll™ 'Messages' page where managers can see at a glance how many pending leave requests require actioning and externally via automated email advising managers they have pending applications to action. Once final approval is granted the employee can also be notified via email that their leave has been approved. Additionally, staff can add comments to their request. Leave approvers also have the ability to add “Reviewer” comments which are optional when approving a leave request but become mandatory when leave requests are declined. Furthermore, approved leave requests can be “Cancelled” by staff by following a similar process as the ones outlined above. [Top]

PSG Payroll™ can have an unlimited amount of leave balance types/ledgers and can be measured in Hours, Days, or Weeks. For example Annual Leave, Sick Leave, TOIL (Time off in Lieu), Alternative Holidays, Boilers Leave, Shift Leave, Long Service Leave and so on. Separating leave types can allow “your” non-legislative leave types to be managed via your leave policies. For example, Annual Leave is usually governed by legislation and Time Off in Lieu is usually managed by company leave policy. In conjunction with Custom Leave Rules leave ledgers additional “intelligence” can be added. For example certain staff such as Shift Workers can be granted access to the “Shift” leave ledger and day workers excluded. Also Long Service Leave can be “hidden” from staff until they have completed “7 seven years” of continuous service. In addition, tracking leave ledgers can be created such as Bereavement or Compassion Leave in which all leave requests relating to that ledger can be quickly viewed and reported on. Leave ledger balances can also be configured to be displayed or hidden on pay slips. Generally, Annual Leave is shown on pay slips and Sick Leave is usually hidden. Moreover, leave ledgers can be made up of many leave items. For example the Sick Leave ledger can be a made up of Sick Leave With Certificate, Sick Leave Without Certificate and Unpaid Sick leave. Also different rates and calculations can be used for each leave item. For example Shift leave can be paid at the staff's hourly pay rate + 17.5% loading. Long Service Leave can be paid at the Staff's Average yearly earnings. [Top]

Each leave request is tracked and an audit stamp recorded against each process step. Up to seven years of leave activity can be accessed in this area. Managers have three filtering options; application status, employee, and date so the information they are viewing is always relevant, further the leave status is also colour coded for ease of reference ie Red = Pending Request, Green = Approved and Purple = Pending Cancellation. [Top]

When it comes to leave accruals, many systems just show the accrual increase in for each period. PSG Payroll™ takes it a step further actually showing the detail behind the accrual in the Leave Balance Ledger. This can be a very useful tool when explaining the process to employees, particularly for those countries where a pro-rata accrual is used for employee's who work part time or variable hours. The accrued leave can be included in the available leave balance via custom rules where required. The accruals can also be displayed as future projections where required, based on the employee's current parameters. As well as providing the accruals for legislatively driven leave, custom accruals can be applied to other leave types as well.

Example: Long Service Leave, with specific acceptance criteria. Long service leave may be granted after 7 years of service, but the company needs to track the potential financial liability. PSG Payroll™ can 'accrue' the long service leave from the commencement of employment, reporting at each pay-run the potential liability even though the leave is not yet available to the employee. The long service leave accrual / balance does not become visible to the employee until they have reached their seventh anniversary. Custom rules can also be applied to the consumption of leave, using long service leave again as an example employee's may be required to apply for the leave in full calendar week blocks i.e. employee's are not able to apply for one day of long service leave.

Additionally, “intelligence” can be added to leave accruals. For example after four years of service a one-off "service holiday" entitlement of 5 days can be allocated. Furthermore, the amount of leave accrual can automatically be linked to staff's personal details such as the leave accrual will increase as staff's employee grades changes. Linking the accrual to the staff's worker type is also commonly used. For example “Shift” worker can be granted an additional weeks leave. By automating leave accruals Payroll and HR staff can spend more time working on more productive areas of the business as opposed to monitoring and then manually changing leave accruals when entitlements are due. [Top]

In certain cases company and sometimes legislative leave policy dictates that unused leave will be expired. PSG Payroll™ can accommodate this requirement by automatically notifying staff beforehand by email (i.e. 4 weeks before expiry) that a nominated amount of their leave will expire. If the leave is not used PSG Payroll™ will mark in the appropriate leave ledger that the leave has expired. For example TOIL is commonly expired after 6 months from when it is earned. [Top]

Leave can be reported in a number of ways, valuation, consumption, exception, movement, cost center and much more. With PSG Payroll™'s end to end solution including Time & Attendance data, leave reporting covers a broader spectrum than standard payroll leave reports and is more meaningful than ever before. Custom exports are available that enable leave data to be imported into third party systems, this can be very beneficial where other enterprise planning software is used, particularly in operational areas. [Top]

Applying for leave that crosses Public Holidays and OFF days is a seamless operation in PSG Payroll™. All that is required is for the Staff member to enter the start and end date of the leave request. PSG Payroll™ will then automatically work out the duration of the leave, check that a sufficient leave balance exists and then email the leave approver. [Top]

Approved leave is clearly shown on all timesheets and rosters with the type and duration of leave. Colours are used to visually differentiate the various leave items (i.e. Annual Leave = Green, Sick Leave= Yellow and so on). Also to aid roster planning pending leave is overlaid on rosters. [Top]

Special leave is a process that is available to allow the normal rules to be over-ridden in special circumstances. This process is often used where an employee has used all their leave entitlement and is requesting additional leave due to extraordinary circumstance. The employee applies for the 'Special' leave in the same way as they would apply for any other leave and would specify in the comments area the reason for the special leave. The special leave application is then directed to the manager for recommendation and once recommended it is directed to a third tier approver, often HR for final approval. [Top]