Recording unpaid leave in excess of one week

ANSWER ID:3984

There will be times when an employee chooses to take leave without pay, such as for sick leave or annual leave when they have already used their entitlements. This page will explain how this can be setup and how to show the unpaid hours taken on the employee's payslip.

As a general note the UNPDLV (Unpaid Leave) pay code can be used to record any form of general unpaid leave that needs to be recorded. There are two ways you can record occasions of leave without pay that exceeds one week: Extend the employee's anniversary date or reduce the Annual Leave rate divisor (if you want to leave the anniversary date unchanged).

To extend the employee's anniversary date

Unless agreed otherwise, you can extend the anniversary date in the employee's leave records by the number of weeks taken in excess of one week. To do this:

Go to the Maintenance command centre and click Maintain Employees.
Click Select Employee.
Click the applicable employee then click OK.
Click the Leave Details tab.
On the Annual Leave & Holiday Pay tab, modify the Next Holiday Anniversary Date accordingly.
A warning message will appear advising that changing the holiday anniversary will require all leave information to be checked. Click Yes to this message.
Click Close.

Important Note: Time while an employee is on ACC, Parental leave, or leave for voluntary military service should not affect the anniversary date for annual holiday purposes. For more information see the following help pages:

Setting up an employee on parental leave and paying annual leave upon their return

Processing the first week of Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) wages

To reduce the Annual Leave rate divisor

With the employees' and the firms mutual agreement, you can leave the anniversary date as is, but then must adjust the divisor for the calculation of their Annual Pay.

Go to Prepare Pays and click the Add Default button to add the pay codes UNPDLV (Unpaid Leave) and UNPDLVEX (Extra Weeks Unpaid Leave) to the employees pay defaults.
For the first week, put their normal hours against the UNPDLV (Unpaid Leave) pay code.
For any subsequent weeks, put their hours against the UNPDLV (Unpaid Leave) pay code to record the unpaid leave, and also put a 1 against the UNPDLVEX (Extra Weeks Unpaid Leave) pay code. This will decrease the divisor for the calculation of the Annual Leave. See our example below.