How do Public Holidays work?

We provide up-to-date national public holidays and regional anniversary dates for each business, automatically. For public holidays to work, the following steps must be taken:

• Set up your locations.
• Set up pay conditions to apply public holiday rates automatically (optional).

Checklist when creating a public holiday

• Assign each location to a regional anniversary day in Payroll classic.
• Manually add public holidays for custom days off not automatically included, such as company-authorised holidays, and assign each location to the public holiday.

Manually add a public holiday

You can access the Public Holiday settings via the Payroll Settings module Public Holidays page, which sits under the Business Management heading. The process is then as follows:

• 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.

Platform provided public holidays 

You can disable a platform provided public holiday by selecting the holiday in the calendar view and clicking the Disable button. We will leave the holiday on your calendar, but there will be a line through the name. To re-enable the holiday, simply select the holidays again and click the Restore System Public Holiday button. 

Configure regional anniversary days 

It is important to set up your regional anniversary day information based on the locations entered on Payroll classic. If you configure the regional anniversary day for a higher-level location, the platform will use this date for any nested locations unless you specify a regional anniversary day.

To configure the regional anniversary day for locations:

• Go to Payroll Settings module.
• Click the Locations option.
• Click on the name of the required location.
• Select the regional anniversary day associated with this location.
• Click the Save button.

Setting up public holiday pay conditions

The below section describes how to set up a basic rule for public holidays. Unless you have set up your pay conditions rules, public holidays are not automatically applied during a pay run.

We assume in the below instructions 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:

• Go to Payroll Settings module.
• Click the Rule Set option.
• Click the Add Rule button.
• Give your rule a name, for example, Public Holidays.
• 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. To do this go to the relevant Employee file, and select the Pay Run Defaults page.