Automatic Extension of Sick Anniversary

The Holidays Act provides employees 10 days of Sick Leave each year, provided:

• they have six months’ current continuous employment with the same employer, or
• they have worked for the employer for six months for:
  • an average of 10 hours per week, and
  • at least one hour in every week or 40 hours in every month.

MBIE has more information on employee entitlement to sick leave here.

PayHero can automatically apply these checks to your employees when they reach their sick leave anniversary.

To enable this setting, navigate to Manage > Settings > Payroll Settings, and tick the following option:

If you have this ticked, whenever an employee crosses their sick leave anniversary, the sick leave criteria will be evaluated. If they have not met the minimum requirements for sick leave they will not have sick leave added to their balances, and their sick leave anniversary will be pushed out. 

A line will also be added to the bottom of the pay, detailing which of the limits they did not meet. You'll also see how many days their anniversary will be extended by, which is the total length of the pay period. 

PayHero will then continue to monitor their last 6 months of work in each pay, extending their anniversary each time (assuming they still do not meet the criteria). If they do meet the minimum criteria in the last six months, they will be given their annual sick leave entitlement, and their anniversary will move forward one year.

Can I exclude employees from pays where they have no earnings?

No. For this feature to work correctly, the employee must be included in all pays, even if they have no earnings, so that their entitlement can be continually assessed in each pay.

How does PayHero know whether the employee meets the criteria?

PayHero will assess each employee's entitlement based on the hours worked in the last six months. This only applies to hours included in the employee's pays. These must be paid hours, so this feature is not currently compatible with Piecemeal Work.

You can see the hours for each employee in their Pay History tab. 

What about Annual Leave entitlements?

If you have employees who have periods of non-employment, for example, if you are a labour hire company where employees have periods without placements, PayHero has a similar setting for Automatic Extension of Holiday Anniversaries