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.

In this article, we will cover how to create leave accounts manually, how you can automate this process, where you can find an overview of the applied leave accounts and how to adjust balances to include previously accrued leave.

If you want to automate the process in which leave accounts are created for your employees, go to Settings > Leave & Overtime > Policies > Click on any of your leave policies to open up the settings > toggle on Create automatically.

The system will now create a leave account for all employees that meet the criteria defined in the policy.

It is important to make sure that the policies are linked to the correct employee types before toggling on “Create automatically” in the policy settings.

If you don't want to create leave accounts automatically for your employees, you can create them manually by going to Schedule > Leave accounts > Manage leave > Create accounts.

Choose if you want to Create an account for one employee or Create accounts for multiple employees.
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First, select the option below:

Accrual period: date from which the employee starts accruing leave on the account.

Account period: the date from which the employee is eligible to use the account.

Accrual rate: amount of holiday accrued based on the chosen policy.

Start balance: quantity of leave available at the start of the account period. Adjust the balance to ensure the employee can access leave accrued prior to setting up the account.

Public holidays: It is the employee’s individual public holiday calendar. Go to How to create and assign Public holiday calendars to find out about it. if leave is booked on a public holiday, no hours will be deducted from the employee’s leave account.

Payroll - Salary code: salary code to be displayed in reports for the employee’s leave.

Advanced details - Notes: Add notes to the account that are only visible to the managers with full access to Planday.

Click Save if you’re happy with the settings.

You can always revisit these settings and adjust them after the leave account has been created.

Choose the option Create accounts for multiple employees.

Step 1: Choose the account template you wish to apply to your employees.

Step 2: Select the departments, employee types and start date.

You can select one or several departments when creating accounts for multiple employees.

When you are happy with the settings, click on Save.

You can always revisit and adjust these settings after creating the leave accounts.

Once a leave account is created for an employee, you can see it listed under the Leave accounts overview page. You can find the overview of applied leave accounts by going to Schedule > Leave accounts.

The period is by default set to show accounts valid in the current month to date.

You can filter by Department, Employee group, Employee type and/or Account names by clicking Additional Filters.

Use the search bar to search for a specific employee or select Account status to define if you want to see active, inactive, available or all leave accounts in your overview.

The page shows the accounts’ accrual rates inherited from their policies. You can also see start balance available at the start of the chosen period, balances accrued and used during the period and the balance available at the end of the period. Adjusting the period filter’s date range lets you inspect account usage across various time periods.
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You might want to adjust a leave account balance to ensure your employee has access to leave they accrued prior to creation of the leave account. This can be done both when creating an account or later when the account is already created.

To sync up balances with your payroll system, identify the date of our last pay run and locate balances on employees’ pay slips. Then adjust the Accrual period start date to match the pay run date and adjust the Start balance of the employees’ accounts in Schedule > Leave accounts.

Alternatively, you can create a Manual adjustment and leave the Start balance at 0 if you prefer to make the change traceable or to add a comment. Please note that adjustments cannot be changed and the only way to alter changes is by creating another adjustment.

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