Setting up balances

Employee balances are dynamic counts of time (in minutes, hours, or days) employees have accrued, which can be used for time away from the workplace. Vacation, sick, and personal days are all types of employee balances that an employee can accrue. Balances can also record the amount of materials, such as uniforms or safety gloves, an employee has accrued.

When setting up balances, you define the amount of time each unit represents, either minutes, hours, or days, and the minimum and maximum amount an employee can accrue. For example, if the VACATION balance is defined as days, with a minimum of zero and a maximum of ten, an employee cannot take a vacation day when they have a balance of zero, and they will never have more than ten available vacation days. Vacation time could be defined as hours or minutes if employees can take portions of a day off.

The application automatically decreases balances when they are used by employees. To accomplish this, balances are linked with time codes that the employees use to record time away from work on their timesheets. For example, the VACATION balance is linked to the VAC time code. Whenever an employee records a VAC time code on their timesheet, the number of units in their VACATION balance decreases by one. If the VACATION balance was defined in minutes or hours, it is reduced according to the amount of time that is marked with its corresponding time code. For example, if an employee enters two hours with the VAC time code, the VACATION balance is reduced by two (if it is accrued in hours) or 120 (if it is accrued in minutes).

When setting up balances, you can define transfers, cascades, and exports which create relationships between the different balances that reflect common business rules.

Balance transfers move the units of one balance to another on a set schedule. For example, at the end of every quarter, any remaining VACATION days become PERSONAL days. So if an employee only took one of their three available vacation days in a quarter, their balance of personal days increases by two.

Balance cascades link balances together and under specified conditions transfer units between them. For example, the VACATION balance can be set to cascade to the SICK balance whenever it is below its minimum of zero. So if an employee recorded six days of vacation when they only had a balance of five, their sixth day off is taken out of their balance of sick days.

Similar to transfers, you can schedule balance deductions, which remove a defined number of units from the balance, or resets, which reset the number of balance units to zero, for any balance. This can reflect company policies where sick days do not carry over from one year to the next.

Additionally, you can set up balance exports to export absence balances as a part of the payroll export task or as a standalone balance export task.

Setting up balances involves these tasks:

  • Creating balances
  • Linking time codes to balances
  • Defining balance transfers, if necessary
  • Defining balance cascades, if necessary
  • Defining balance exports, if necessary
  • Setting up balance deductions, if necessary
  • Setting up balance resets, if necessary