Determination of whether the new setting will appear is based on whether the "Pay these earnings by default in a pay run" setting is selected in the employee’s Pay Run Defaults screen. If the employee is not paid by default, the new setting will not appear.

Once an employee is set to be paid by default, a check box ‘Automatically apply Public Holiday Not Worked earnings lines’ will appear on the Employee Pay Run Defaults page. When you select this and save, the automation of Public Holidays Not Worked will apply.

This setting can only be saved when all of the following are true:

• They do not use the timesheet setting ‘Submit timesheets to submit all time worked’.
• They do not use an award.
• They do not use an enterprise agreement.
• They do not use a pay rate template.
• They do not use a pay condition rule set.
• They do not use the ‘Split by Location’ or ‘Split by Dimension’ settings for their earnings.

If any of the above criteria have not been matched, an error message will appear on the Pay Run Defaults page and will itemise which fields will need to be reviewed. Before the Public Holiday Not Worked automation setting can be saved, the settings listed have to be corrected.

The employee’s Primary Location and the Public Holiday calendar are what drives the Public Holidays applying in a pay run once it falls within a pay period. You will need to configure the states within locations correctly. For a guide on how to do so, feel free to review the Locations guide.

Before a public holiday auto-applies you will need to have it it configured to the relevant state. Please refer to the following article if you need to set up any public holidays which are legislated by State Governments. State and Federal public holidays are already available. Refer to Public Holidays for more information.

The number of hours to pay will be determined as per the employees Hours per day in their Pay run Defaults screen or their Advanced Hours.

Once an employee is set to be paid by default, a check box will appear in the Employee Pay Run Defaults page which can be selected and the automation of Public Holidays Not Worked will apply.

The number of hours paid for Public Holiday Not Worked will be determined by the employee's ‘hours per day’ field in their Pay Run Defaults screen or their Advanced Hours. A Monday to Friday work week is assumed unless the employees has advanced hours configured. If an employee is using advanced hours, the hours paid for the public holiday will be determined by the hours configured for that particular day.

Any timesheets submitted on a Public Holiday for auto-paid employees will ‘add’ to the Public Holiday (as per normal functionality). If the public holiday hours need to be reduced, this will require manual adjustment.

Once the employee has been set up and is included in a pay run in a pay period where a Public Holiday is included, their pay will look like the following:

The employee’s pay slip will look like the following. Please note, if ‘Show line notes’ is enabled in your Pay Slips settings, the public holidays will be separately itemised.

All relevant reports, which report on individual pay categories, will provide separate reporting of Public Holiday not worked when it has been applied.

According to Fair Work guidance, an employee is not paid for any public holiday that falls during a time when the employee is on unpaid leave. Within the platform, this is recognised when a leave request for leave without pay encompasses a public holiday (i.e. the leave request extends prior to and after the public holiday).

When this occurs in the pay run, no further action is required by the user - the public holiday earnings lines will be removed from the pay run.

• There is no interaction with timesheets and public holidays at this stage. When an employee is using the ‘Timesheets by exception’ setting and imports a timesheet on a public holiday, there will be no automatic adjustment to the public holiday hours. Any adjustments that are required will need to be performed manually.
• Any timesheets submitted on public holidays will need to use a work type relating to an appropriate pay category. This feature is not intended to alter the payment of public holidays worked by employees, as businesses may have different arrangements. It is up to the user to configure the appropriate work types and pay categories as required.
• An additional note to keep in mind is that when employees are configured to use advanced work patterns, these may change over time. As per existing functionality, if a leave request is created and approved based on a specific advanced work pattern configuration, the total hours will not automatically be revised if the employee’s work pattern changes later. If an employee’s work pattern changes, then payroll admins will need to review associated leave requests and manually change where required.