Create Contract rules

Contract rules let you specify the details of contracted hours for your employees and guide your planning while making schedules.

Maud avatar
Written by Maud
Updated over a week ago

🎯 This article is intended for users who haven't imported an award via our Award library. You can read the articles on How to set up your own employment terms if you're not using an Award.

Use Contract rules to compare your employees’ scheduled hours to those they’re contracted for right inside the schedule. Setting these rules allows for better insight into which employees have enough hours, which can be contracted for additional hours, and which ones have exceeded their contract limit.


How to create Contract rules

If you are unsure about the rules relevant to your employees in respect to overtime and their hours of work, please refer to the Fair Work Ombudsman or seek professional legal advice as necessary.

To create Contract rules, go to Settings > People > Contract rules > Create Contract rule.

In Step 1, Name the Contract rule, enter an optional description to help you remember what the contract rule is about, and press Continue.

In Step 2, If certain Shift types should be excluded from the Contract rule, you can deselect them by pressing the Edit button on Shift types. Such Shift types could, for instance, be Shift types that don’t count as Ordinary hours, i.e. Unpaid leave.

The start date set is the day and date from which the scheduled hours are counted. For example, if the start date is set to 1 June with an interval length of 1 week and 40 total hours, we can then expect that 40 hours should be worked from the 1st to the 7th, the 8th to the 14th, and so on.

  • Important: If Monday is the start day of your week in the Schedule, then you should always choose a Monday as the start date in your Contract rule.

  • You can always choose an individual date for each of your employees when you assign the contract rule to them.

You can now choose the Interval type, which is either Day, Week, Month or Year. You then put in the appropriate number of hours as they relate to the chosen interval.

If you choose the Month option, you will be asked to choose between Average (same number of hours each month) or Individual months (input a specific number of hours for each month of the year).

Add additional rules for daily working and maximum hours

You have the option to Add additional rules. This lets you specify daily working hours and set the maximum hours after which overtime should apply.

When setting Daily working hours, you can set a time interval (i.e. 7am to 7pm) that applies to all days of the week. If your Daily working hours are not the same each day, such as on the weekends, you can also set them for each individual day of the week.

When setting Maximum hours per day, you have the same options to either set a particular number of hours to apply to all days of the week or individually set each day's maximum number of ordinary hours. Select the checkbox if values are different for each day.

Shift type for overtime

To have excess hours be suggested through a different shift type such as 'Overtime' in Timesheets, select a shift type from the drop down list.


Next:

To easily record Overtime, you will need to:

  • Set up shift types and link them to payroll supplements

  • Assign Contract rules to employees

Click on Overview of Contract rules and Overtime to learn more about this.


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