What are Work Days?

Work Days are recorded on each pay you process in PayHero and are key to accurate Annual Leave Rate and Other Leave Rate calculations. This article covers what Work Days are, how PayHero calculates them, and how you can manually specify Work Days if required. 

How are Work Days automatically calculated? 

Employees with Work Days in their Work Pattern

If the employee has a set Employee Work Pattern, this is what will be populating the Work Days value, irrespective of when Time is recorded in the Timesheets.

The number of days in the timesheet are ignored in these cases, because often an employee with a clear Work Pattern might only record overtime or additional payments in the timesheets, rather than recording all of their hours like more irregular employees do. This means their timesheets aren't necessarily expected to represent all of the days they worked in a given week. 

Employees without Work Days in their Work Pattern

If the employee has No Regular Week or No Regular Days set as the work pattern, the information drawn from Timesheets will populate the Work Days value.

Leave entries recorded in the Leave tab that are included in a pay will also contribute to the number of Work Days associated with the pay for those employees.

Recorded time (and approved leave) will only be included in a pay, and increase the number of Work days appropriately, if it was recorded/approved before the Draft Pay was created.

What counts as a Work Day?

As a rule of thumb, Work Days are any day in the pay period that an employee receives payment for, even if they are only paid for part of the day. This includes days worked as usual, Sick Leave, Annual Leave, and so on. 

Each day should only be counted once. Even if the employee only works a few hours, or takes a half-day of leave, this should be recorded as one full day. 

Cashed Up leave doesn't apply to specific days in the pay period, and Unpaid Leave is not a paid day, so both can be excluded from an employee's Work Days. 

For example, Jane gets paid weekly. This week she had:

• A day of Annual leave on Monday
• A half-day of Sick Leave on Tuesday (she didn't have enough Sick Leave to take the full day as Sick Leave)
• Two days of Ordinary Time for Wednesday and Thursday
• One day of Unpaid Leave for Friday

Jane has 4 Work Days for this pay period, for the Annual Leave, Sick Leave, and two paid days of work. 

How do I correct Work Days? 

Pays where the employee has normal earnings but 0 Work Days recorded display an error and the pay can't be sent. To correct this error, you'll need to enter the number of days worked over the pay period by clicking into the affected employee from the draft pay and entering an appropriate value into the 'Work Days' field at the top.

If a pay has been sent with the incorrect number of Work Days, there's an easy fix.

Navigate to the employee's Pay History tab. Manually change the number of Work Days in the Days column. Click Save to save your changes. 

One Off Pays and Work Days 

When processing a One Off Pay for an employee, it's important to think about whether any Work Days should be applied or not. In some cases, you might be running a One Off Pay because an employee was completely missed from a pay period - in this case, you should absolutely record the appropriate Work Days for the pay period. 

Alternatively, you may have processed some days in the original pay, and now need to apply an extra payment for some days the employee forgot to record in the timesheets. In this case, check how many Work Days were set on the original pay, and set the Work Days on the One Off Pay so that the total number of Work Days recorded across both pays correctly reflects how many days the employee worked on in the pay period. This may also mean setting the Work Days to 0, if all days worked are already accounted for in the original pay. 

Finally, if the One Off Pay doesn't relate to days of work at all (e.g. it's for a bonus or other additional payment), then no Work Days are required.