Time and Attendance Plus is capable of doing your sick time accruals for your employees who are entitled to it. Here's a short tutorial showing you how to configure the software to do your sick time accrual calculations for you, and a brief explanation of how Time and Attendance Plus carries out the calculations involved.

Add an employment type

Sick Time accruals are associated with employment types. This saves you time by allowing you to set up one sick time accrual scheme to cover a group of employees. It also allows you infinite flexibility by having one employment type per employee and having a unique sick time accrual scheme per employee. Firstly let's log into Time and Attendance Plus and go to the Tools & Options->Employment Types screen.

Click the button to add a new employment type and let's add new employment type. Just call the new employment type anything you like, but in our case we'll call it the tutorial employment type

The Sick Time Accrual Screen

Time and Attendance Plus allows you to setup a sick time accrual scheme for each employment type. You can access the sick time accruals from the main options area of Time and Attendance Plus.

Let's take a look at this screen. You can select which employment type you wish to apply the sick time accrual scheme to in the drop down box at the top. You now have 6 main settings to configure for you to calculate your employees sick time accruals.

1. Start Accruing Hire Date Plus - this specifies the delay (if any) after the employee is hired that Time and Attendance Plus will start accruing sick time time.
2. Start With - this allows the employee to start with a non-zero balance of available sick time hours. This may be useful for workplaces that give employees sick time time in advance (ie before they have earned it).
3. Accrue - this is the number of hours the employee will accrue for each time unit specified in the next setting.
4. For Every - this is the time unit at which the sick time time accrues. Allowable units are hours, weeks, and months. When set to hour Time and Attendance Plus will accrue for each hour worked. When set to week Time and Attendance Plus will accrue for each week of elapsed time since the employee was hired. When set to month Time and Attendance Plus will accrue for each calendar month of elapsed time since the employee was hired.
5. Stop Accruing - this allows you to set an absolute limit on the amount of sick time time that the employee can accrue.
6. Carry Balance Forward Yearly - when set the employees sick time time owing at the end of one fiscal year will roll over into the next fiscal year. The fiscal year is determined by the date set on the Payroll Settings page.

Setting up a Sick Time Accrual Sample

We'll now go ahead and setup a sample sick time accrual scheme for the purposes of this tutorial. Firstly select the Tutorial Employment Type from the drop down list. Then setup the parameters as shown in the image below. Note that you must check the Accrues Sick Time Time checkbox to setup the parameters for the sick time accrual scheme.

In our example:

1. The employee starts accruing sick time 1 month after the hire date.
2. The employee starts with a zero balance.
3. The employee accrues 6.667 hrs of sick time time for each month elapsed one month after hire date. This equates to 2 full weeks of sick time time per year for a 40.0 hour week worked.
4. The employee has a maximum balance of 80 hours or 2 full 40 hour weeks.
5. The balance at the end of one fiscal year carries forward to the next fiscal year. So if an employee ends the year with 40.0 hours of leave owing then they will start accruing at this amount in the next year.

Assigning the Employee Type

The last step in the process is to assign the employees to the employment type and to make sure the employee is setup to actually accrue sick time time. Click the Save button on the options page to save the changes to the sick time accrual scheme. Then select an employee from your employee list and select the Manage Employees->Edit Employee menu. When on the Edit the Selected Employee screen select the Payroll Information page.

On this screen all we need to do is to set the employment type in the drop down box to the tutorial employment type. Then make sure the Accrue Sick Time Time checkbox is ticked. When this is done click the Save Employee button and our employee is now ready to accrue sick time time.

Conclusions

All we have done here is setup an employee to accrue sick time time. We still need to be able to report on sick time time owed and taken. Obviously we still need to enter sick time time as taken by the employee. They are a subject for a subsequent tutorial!