Create a Rule for Alternative Days (NZ)

Overview

If your workforce is paid on an hourly basis (ie using hourly timesheets), you will need to use the Rules Engine to create a pay item to use to accrue Alternative Days 

This ensures that you can determine what constitutes a ‘day’, regardless of how many hours an employee has worked.

Create a Pay Item for Alternative Day Accrual

You can create a new pay item specifically for Alternative Day accrual to make managing your rules and reporting easier.

When setting up the pay item, ensure that you set the Rate Multiplier to 0 as you don’t want to pay the employee for the accrual.

Create a Rule for Alternative Day Accrual

Once the pay item is created, you can create the rule. 

Condition

You want to identify whether someone has worked on a public holiday. There are a number of ways that you can approach this, depending on how the rest of your rules are managed.

Tagging

If you have already tagged your public holidays, you can tag the Alternative Day Accrual. The Tag you enter is the same as what you have already set up to identify your public holidays. For example:

Action

Once you have identified that an employee has worked, you will need a pay item that you can accrue from. Creating the second pay item allows you to still pay the employee for actual hours worked on the public holiday.

1. Add an Action to your rule and select ‘Assign Pay Item’ in the Action Type drop-down field.

2. Select the Pay Item you have created.

3. Select ‘Add as extra units’

4. Enter the number of Units you want to assign.

Accruing Units

The number of units that you assign is important.

If Alternative Days are accruing as days, this value should be set as 1 (ie one Alternative Day accrual for each relevant public holiday worked). This is the most common method as the leave category will enable employees to take partial days off if you want to allow this.

If Alternative Days are accrued as hours, enter the Units value to reflect the number of hours in a standard day (eg 8).

The option can be used if there are some employees that are allowed to take partial Alternative Days and others who should only take full days. You can manage this variation in the different leave categories that you set up.

Please note that this may lead to some issues with the determination of the employee’s hourly pay rate as the figures are being converted in and out multiple times.