How do public holidays work?

We provide up-to date state and federal public holidays for our users. We do not include public holidays legislated by state governments by default, but, you can easily add these to Payroll classic. You can utilise them in the following ways:

• We determine public holidays based upon the employee's default location.
• Public holidays are excluded when estimating the amount of leave required for leave applications. 
• You may set up pay condition rule sets to automatically pay employees at a different rate for the public holiday.

Please note that unless you set up pay conditions rule sets, public holidays are not automatically applied during a pay run. Public holidays do not impact permanent employees as their earnings do not change. They still receive payment, however, even though they did not work that day and there will be no reference to the Public Holiday in the pay run.

Set up requirements for public holidays

For public holidays to work, you must take the following steps:

• Configure the state for your locations.
• Set up pay conditions to automatically apply public holiday rates.

Public holiday checklist

• Assign each location, a state in payroll.
• Manually add public holidays for custom holidays not automatically included, such as local/regional and company-authorised.
• Assign each location a state. 

Manually adding public holidays

You can access the Public Holidays page via the Payroll Settings module and the process is:

• Click on the required date in the calendar, to add a public holiday. Please check for all national and regional public holidays not listed and add them in manually if required. 
• Enter in the description and add in the specific locations entitled to the public holiday.
• Click the Save button.
• Once saved, the manually added public holiday will show up in the calendar.

System public holidays 

1. You can disable a platform public holiday.
2. Select the holiday and choose the disable option.
3. It leaves the holiday on your calendar, but there will be a line through the name.
4. To re-enable the holiday, simply select it again and choose the Restore the System Public Holiday option. 

Configuring the state of locations

All public holidays operate at either the state level or a specific location level. So it is important to enter the state information when setting up your locations on the platform. Please note that if you configure the state on a higher-level location, we will use this for any nested locations unless they also specify a state. To configure the state for locations:

• Go to your Payroll Setting Locations page.
• Find the required location and click on the name.
• Select the relevent state for the location.
• Click the Save button.

Setting up public holiday pay conditions

The information below describes how to set up a basic rule for public holidays. We will assume in this section that you have set up an appropriate Public Holiday pay category and that you have configured the public holiday rates for the employees. To add a public holiday rule to your existing rule set:

• Click the Add Rule on the right hand side of the page.
• Give your rule a name.
• In the When section, choose the Public Holiday option.
• In the Then section, choose the Apply Pay Category option and then select an appropriate Public Holiday pay category,
• Click the Save button.

Be sure to activate the rule set and associate the rule set with the appropriate employees. There are different scenarios in which you may want to automate for your Public Holidays.

Further information

• When a salaried employee does not work, a public holiday and the public holiday is a paid public holiday, the platform will reflect a normal working day and we will not highlight the public holiday as different.
• We do not automatically add Public holidays to your pay run. So your timesheet employees will need to create a timesheet using either a worked or not-worked work type that you have linked to the appropriate pay category.
• Alternatively, if the public holiday is not worked and not paid, your employees do not need to submit a timesheet
• To automate the public holiday process using rule sets, watch: Automate Public Holidays using Rule Sets | Video