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Description of leave policies
Description of leave policies

Everything you need to know about Leave Policies

Karen Hutchinson avatar
Written by Karen Hutchinson
Updated over a week ago

🎯 For admins who need to allocate leave policies to their employees in line with their employees’ leave and absence entitlements.

If you are unsure of what leave and absence employment terms are correct for your business 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.

Please note that leave balances displayed in Planday are only estimates and you and your employees are always advised to check Xero Payroll for exact leave account balances. We encourage you to perform regular reviews and audits of leave accruals and balances to ensure your business is meeting your obligations as an employer with respect to your employees’ entitlements.

Description of the leave policies

There are six pre-configured policies in Planday that will automatically be set up to only be available to the applicable employee types from the selected Award.

You can then apply them to your employees to give them access to request leave. To see these policies, go to Settings > Leave > Policies.

  • If mapped correctly in the Planday Xero integration, this record will make sure leave hours can be synced to Xero Payroll, meaning any leave requested and approved within Planday will be deducted from your employee’s balance in Xero when you conduct your pay run. Follow this link to map your leave types.

Available policies:

  • The “Annual leave (paid)” leave policy is available to Full-time and Part-time employees.

  • The “Compassionate leave (paid)” policy is available to Full-time and Part-time employees.

  • The “Compassionate leave (unpaid)” leave policy is available to Casual employees.

  • The “Personal / Carer’s leave (paid) policy is available to Full-time and Part-time employees

  • The ”Personal / Carer’s leave (Unpaid)” policy is available to all employees.

  • “Unpaid leave” is available to all your employee types.

Note: Whilst you are able to make changes to the policies, please note that overriding or changing these configurations could be in breach of your compliance obligations. You should seek independent legal advice as appropriate for your business.

Please note that Planday focuses on the most common types of leave and absence and does not cover all of the leave and absence types, for example, Long Service Leave, Community Service Leave and Parental Leave. Please refer to this Help Centre article for more information about the leave and absence exclusions.

Modify the policy settings

If you’d like to change any of the settings above to suit your business needs, go to Settings > Leave > Policies. Here you select the account in question and press to open it - or edit it via the pencil on the far right of the screen.

You can make changes to some of the settings such as:

The description of the account:

Optional field to add a description for the account. By default this is empty.

Accrual period start date:

This is the date from which employees start accruing leave on their account balances. The date can be adjusted similarly to the Policy period below.

Policy period Start Date:

This is the date from which the employees can request leave use the account. The accounts are by default valid from the 1st of January in the current year and for an unlimited period, which means the leave accounts do not expire and your employees keep the same account throughout their employment. This date can be changed on each employee’s account should the employee start later than the date set in the policy. Click on Apply Leave Accounts to your employees to find out how to do this.

The Apply automatically checkbox:

If you select this option, the system will automatically apply this Policy for all new and existing employees who match the selected options. This does not happen by default. It is advisable to confirm that all your employees belong to the right department, employee group and employee type before activating this.

Accrual Policy:

This section describes how your employees accrue leave for their leave account. Each policy comes with a pre-defined accrual policy. Changes of the accrual policy will affect all existing employee leave accounts and their current balances.

Requirements for accrual

Shift types:

Control which shifts in schedule contribute to the accrued leave based on their shift types.

Work hours per day

Assign

If you previously set up Awards, leave policies will be applied to relevant employee types based on the Award. Make sure that employees are assigned the relevant employee type.

Negative balance:

Employees can by default apply for leave beyond the estimated balance of their leave account. The amount of extra days can be adjusted in the text field below the checkbox.

Consecutive leave days:

Here you can set a restriction to the number of consecutive days of leave that an employee can request. You can select "unlimited", which is the most common setting, or "set fixed limit". When selecting "unlimited", the administrator will still have to approve a holiday request and thus have the option to reject an extended holiday if necessary. By default, this is set to 2 days for Compassionate leave and switched off for the other types of leave.

Payroll

Salary code

See related articles:

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