Irregular Hours Employees - Payroll Web Platform

The review period can be set at the business level in the Leave Categories screen.

1. Log in to your payroll platform.
2. Go to Payroll Settings
3. Select Leave Categories
4. You then need to change the number of weeks in the Irregular hours work pattern review period. This will default to 4 weeks but you can choose from 2 to 8 weeks depending on your needs.

You can also set it at the employee level if you require different review periods for some employees.

1. Go to the Employee list.
2. Select or search for the employee you need to change the review period for.
3. Go to the employee Pay Rates screen and enter from 2 to 8 weeks in the Irregular hours work pattern review period.
4. Next, go to the Pay Run Defaults screen.
5. Make sure Irregular Employment is ticked to guarantee the system uses the review period when the employee takes leave.

When an employee is ticked for Irregular employment, when they take annual holidays the system will first look at their timesheet data to determine the number of hours they have been paid during the review period then divide that by the number of weeks in the review period to get the average weekly hours. For example, the company work week is Monday to Sunday and the employee is applying for leave on the Wednesday of that week.

The review period is set to 4 weeks and the employee has worked a total of 83 hours over that 4 week period, so the calculation will be 83 / 4 = 20.75 which is the average the system will use to convert the hours requested into weeks.

If the employee has a recurring work pattern over a number of weeks, you can enter an advanced work pattern of up to 8 weeks.

1. To enter an advanced work pattern go to the Employee list.
2. Select or search for the employee
3. Click on Pay Run Defaults.
4. Click Advanced next to the Standard Work Week. Add the First week reference date which will be the start date of the first week then enter the start/stop times or just the number of hours they work on the days they would normally work.
5. You can then add further weeks as required. At the end of the last week the work pattern will revert back to the beginning and start at week 1 again.

Employees who work irregular hours should always be setup to accrue 4 standard weeks per year to ensure compliance with the Holidays Act. Due to the nature of hours and days being irregular, to set them up with anything but 4 weeks would not ensure they would get their full entitlement.

When employees apply for leave, they can apply in hours, days or weeks and when the leave is imported into the pay run, the system will use the averaging period to convert the leave back to weeks for the reduction of their leave balance.

How do hours taken get converted to weeks?

When an employee applies for leave in hours, the system converts those hours into weeks using the review period. Using the example where the employee is set to a review period of 4 weeks, they have worked 83 hours over that 4 week period giving them an average of 20.75 hours and they apply for 4 hours of leave the conversion will be 4 / 20.75 = .19 of a week.