Automatic Extension of Holiday Anniversary

As per the Holidays Act, PayHero will automatically give employees four weeks of leave when they cross their leave anniversary. What happens if the employee has had periods during the year when they have not been working?

One common situation is where employees take extended periods of unpaid leave. How to handle this is described here: Unpaid Leave

Another scenario is common in labour hire and horticulture. If an employee has two months between assignments where they are not working, then how do you adjust their leave so they don't receive four weeks when they only actually worked ten months?

This can be handled in PayHero by extending out the leave anniversary, deferring the date when they receive their entitlement. 

Note that if you are extending anniversaries you need to make sure this is covered by your employment agreements.

We would recommend seeking guidance from an employment lawyer, as this may entail at the very least defining non-continuous employment and clearly setting an understanding of what will happen with employment is non-continuous.

How do I extend the leave anniversary? 

You could change the anniversary manually by editing the employee. However, if you have a large number of employees this becomes very difficult to keep track of.

PayHero can make these adjustments automatically. PayHero support can set up your company so that if an employee is excluded from a number of pays, when they are finally included in a pay again their holiday anniversary will be automatically extended.

When setting this up on your company we will ask you for the number of days you want to use as a buffer. Only if employees are excluded for more than this number of days will the holiday anniversary be changed. For example, if you elect this to be set to seven, the effect will be the same as Unpaid Leave where the first week of non-work has no impact on the leave anniversary. Thus an employee with four weeks between assignments will only have their leave anniversary extended by three weeks.

Employees need to be excluded from pays (rather than being included in the pay with zero earnings) to trigger the extension. The easiest way to do this is to use Exclude Zero Pays under the options button when on the Payroll > Review tab, or Remove Zero Pays when editing a draft pay.

If an employee is being paid after a period of non-work, the following line will be added to their pay. In this example, the anniversary is being extended by 14 days:

Also, a warning in the pay will inform you that the leave anniversary is to be extended.

A note about public holidays

Take care if you have automated public holidays enabled. When looking at a review period, employees who haven't been at work will still be considered to have worked for the purposes of determining Otherwise Working Days. You may want to remove these employees from the pay. To identify them, you can use Insights and run a report using the Pay Detail table, filtering on Pay Item to Non-Continuous Employment.

If extending holiday anniversaries, you will probably also want Automatic Extension of Sick Anniversary.