All of your employees are entitled to Sick Leave (SL) of ten days as per the Holidays (Increasing Sick Leave) Amendment Bill, effective from the 24th July 2021 and Domestic Violence Leave (DVL) of ten days. If they have six months of current and continuous employment with you, or if they have worked for you for six months with an average of ten hours per week and at least one hour in every week or 40 hours in every month.

Additionally, the entitlement continues every 12 months thereafter; i.e., it is 12 months beginning at the end of the six-month period, not from an employee's start date. The entitlement to sick leave is not varied depending on part-time or full-time employment. Every employee is entitled to 10 days’ sick leave per year and can accrue up to 20 days of sick leave a year.

Default leave categories

You can read more detailed information on leave categories here. By default, each business will have platform created leave categories configured for both SL and DVL. A few notes on the setup of both SL and DVL are as follows:

Automatically accrues based on the employee's leave year

Using this setting allows you to define when the employee's leave year for this leave category will begin, as opposed to assuming that leave will start accruing from the employee's start date. The setting is essential for SL and DVL because ‌entitlement falls after six months of continuous employment. 

Leave entitlement for leave to start after

We have set this leave entitlement to start after six months from the employee's start date. It means that once the employee reaches their six month employment anniversary date, within the relevant pay run period that their six anniversary date falls within, the employee will accrue their SL/DVL entitlement in full. SL/DVL will continue to accrue in full every 12 months thereafter, i.e., 12 months from their six-month anniversary date, not the employee's start date. 

Standard allowance = standard days per year

We have set this setting for SL and DVL entitlement allowance at ten Standard days per year for SL and ten Standard days per year for DVL. 

Accrue in advance

We have ticked this setting because the employee is entitled to the full amount of SL, i.e., ten days and DVL, i.e., 10 days when the entitlement period kicks in.

Accruals for this leave category are limited to a maximum of

We have applied this setting to cap the amount of leave that the employee can accrue in a year. For SL, this is ten days and DVL is ten days.

Carry over a maximum of

We have applied this setting to cap the amount of unused leave that carries over to the next entitlement period. For SL, this is ten days and DVL is zero days. For SL, the carry over maximum amount is in addition to the balance of leave accrued in the leave year i.e. the carry over maximum is configured as ten days  + 10 days allowed per leave year =  20 days capping. 

Setting up SL and DVL entitlements for employees 

The crucial step here for the employee's annual holidays entitlement to accrue correctly, is to make sure you record the employee's start date accurately in the employee's details page. You will notice that sick leave does not accrue per pay run; this is intentional, as it is not a concept found in the Holidays Act 2003.

For the first 6 months of current and continuous employment, as described above, employees are entitled to an additional ten days’ sick leave. If an employee does no meet the criteria, in any year they work for you, they do not accrue any new sick leave until they meet the criteria again.

SL and DVL entitlement will automatically kick in the relevant pay run period when the employee has reached six months after their employment start date. Also, ‌entitlement continues every 12 months thereafter, and the 12 months begin at the end of the six-month period, not from the employee's start date.

We will include SL and DVL entitlement in the employee's leave balances. After you allocate the SL and DVL entitlement yo the employee, you may notice in the following relevant pay run for the employee; SL and DVL leave adjustment will display.

It makes sure that the maximum of ten days for SL and ten days for DVL has been reached for the leave year and carried over or adjusted accordingly where required. Note that SL is capped at 20 days and ten days for DVL. 

Pay run warnings

Within a pay run, you will notice at times a Warnings tab appears with a list of warnings about that pay run. One warning of relevance here is that employees may have missed leave entitlements. The warning is useful as it will identify to the payroll administrator which employees may have missed their leave entitlement.

A scenario for this is if you exclude the employee from the pay run in the pay period that the leave should have been accrued in. The warning will appear in the next pay run and will display until you manually accrue the leave in a pay run for the employee. To manually accrue leave, within an employee row of a pay run, click the Actions button, then click the Accrue Leave button.

Then, from the drop down, select the Sick Leave option and input ten days‌, or Domestic Violence Leave and input ten days. Make sure you click the Calendar button which will enable the yearly accrual cap. Laslty, click the Save button.

It is important to note that you may require to adjust SL and DVL accordingly where you have manually added accrued SL and DVL to make sure that the employee's SL and DVL does not go above and beyond the SL and DVL cap.