This article will guide you on how to enable an Award and apply the configurations to your employees, so you can keep track of rates of pay, worked hours, penalties and overtime.

If you’re unsure of the correct Award coverage for your company or your employees, we encourage you to visit the Fair Work Commission Awards finder page or contact the Fair Work Ombudsman to discuss this further. Getting this right is very important and sets the foundation for paying your employees correctly. You should also seek any independent legal advice as appropriate for your business.

You can import an Award from the Planday Award library from the Dashboard.

Go to your Dashboard and under Set up your Employment terms using Awards, click on the Set up button. Select the applicable Award and click on Enable. The built-in award interpretation will be configured to your Planday organisation shortly.

You can also enable an Award by navigating to People > Employment terms & Awards and click “Award library” in the top right corner and select which of the Awards you would like to enable.

To see what will be configured for each of the different awards, navigate to the Australian awards list.

The next step is to apply the award configuration to your employees so it matches their employment terms. If you have not yet created your employees, you can navigate to this article to learn more about creating employees or navigate to this article to import your employees from Xero.

Navigate to People > Press the pencil to edit an employee > switch to the Employment tab > Employee type > press Edit and choose the appropriate Employee type.

Selecting the correct employee type is the foundation for overtime rates, penalties and Working time rules applying for this employee.

Employees need to be linked to an Employee group before you can apply a Classification or to set the hourly wage for them. Once they are linked to an Employee group you can either choose a preset classification level or you can add an arbitrary hourly rate.

Navigate to People > Employees > Edit employee > switch to Employment tab > Employee groups, to assign an employee group and set the hourly rate.

Once you have chosen the appropriate classification or input a wage specific to the employee, press Save.

When choosing a classification or setting a specific wage, it’s important to always check the Award and Fair Work’s Pay and Conditions Tool (P.A.C.T) if you’re unsure of the correct classification(s) or rate(s) to allocate to your business. Getting this right is very important and sets the foundation for paying your employees correctly. Alternatively contact the Fair Work Ombudsman to discuss this in more detail.

Contract rules can be used to help you keep track of employees’ worked hours and overtime.

Navigate to People > Employees > Edit employee > switch to Employment tab > Contract rules to add a contract rule.

Next you need to set the start date and input the hours in the intervals as agreed upon between you and your employee. We recommend aligning start and valid from date with your pay cycle to ensure alignment in tracking of hours.

To learn more about Contract rules, please see the article: Overview of Contract rules and Overtime.

To learn more about Contract rules, please see the article Overview of Contract rules and Overtime.

To add a holiday calendar to Planday, navigate to Settings > General > Public holiday calendar > Add public holiday calendar.

The first calendar will be set as default and automatically assigned to all employees. You can edit the calendar later for each employee.

You can use the system calendars in Planday by selecting the appropriate calendar from the 'Create from existing' dropdown. You can later modify and add further dates if needed.

You can also leave the Create from existing field blank and build a calendar from scratch by adding the dates manually.

You need to put a start and end date for the calendar. We recommend the start date to align with when you started using Planday and the end date to be a few years out in the future as Planday will be updating the System calendars by adding more dates for future years and you’ll need to extend your public holiday calendar.

Learn more by navigating to How to create and assign Public Holiday calendars.

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