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New Zealand only

<This is the Old EA version - new content needed for New EA>

One of the most challenging areas of the Holidays Act to manage is keeping accurate balances of Annual Holidays entitlement when your employees have varied working patterns or change their working hours. This is because Annual Holiday entitlement is provided by the Act in weeks and most of us think about and manage our work and holidays in days and hours.

Because MYOB Essentials determines Annual Holiday entitlements for your employees in hours, you'll need to be able to demonstrate how those hours translate into the equivalent of 4 weeks Annual Holidays. It is also important that you adjust the balance for any change in your employees work pattern. This entitlement to holidays needs to genuinely reflect their working pattern at the time of any Annual Holidays taken.

To manage Annual Holidays for your employees you need to ensure you have an agreement with them on what a working week means (i.e. how many hours), this must genuinely reflect their working pattern at the time of any holidays taken. It is important to ensure that this is always accurate and up to date in MYOB Essentials as it is used to manage the entitlements and calculate rates of pay for Annual Holidays.

For example:

If you need to adjust an employee's leave balance, use the Opening leave balance in the employee's contact record (Payroll menu > Employees > click the employee > Leave tab > Annual holidays > Opening leave balance).

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Simply increase or decrease this value to increase or decrease the employee's leave balance. For example, to increase their leave balance by 1 week, increase their opening leave balance by 1.

If an employee's working week changes

When If you change an employee’s working hours, MYOB Essentials will prompt you to update their leave balances on the Leave the Hours worked per week (in the Standard pay tab of their employee record. You may need to adjust the employee’s:

• Annual entitlement
• Available balance, and
• Estimated leave accrued since anniversary

Suggested adjustments are provided on the Leave tab alongside each of the fields you need to change.

Annual entitlement

This is the amount of leave (in hours) the employee accrues during the year. This should be entered as hrs/year (fixed) and not weeks (pro-rata). The amount in this field should be equal to their weekly working hours times four (although you may choose to give them more).

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For example, if the employee originally worked 40 hours per week, they'd be entitled to 160 hours of leave per year (4 x 40 = 160). If their hours change to 20 hours per week, you should update this value to their new entitlement of 80 hours of leave per year (4 x 20 = 80).

In both cases, this is equivalent to four weeks at their normal hours.

Available balance adjustment

The Available balance is the amount of leave the employee became entitled to at their last anniversary date and has not yet used. Employees become entitled to their leave all at once, once per year, on the anniversary of their employment start date.

When the employee's hours change, this amount also needs to be updated, to make sure the employee has the same number of weeks of leave available as before their hours changed.

For example, say an employee originally worked 40 hours per week, and had 120 hours of leave available, which is equivalent to 3 weeks. If their hours change to 20 hours per week, this 120 hours now equates to 6 weeks of leave, which is more than they had before. Instead, they should now be entitled to 60 hours (3 weeks x 20 hours = 60 hours). To fix this, adjust their available leave balance to 60 hours by entering an adjustment amount of -60 in the Available balance adjustment field (120 - 60 = 60).

Estimated leave accrued adjustment

The Estimated leave accrued since anniversary is an estimate of how much leave they have ‘accrued’ since their last anniversary, but are not legally entitled to take yet. This leave is added to the employee's available leave balance each year on their anniversary date, and it is then available to take.

For example, say an employee works 20 hours a week and has 40 hours (2 weeks) of Estimated leave accrued since anniversary. That employee then goes up to 40 hours a week, so their Estimated leave accrued since anniversary must be doubled to 80 so that they still have 2 weeks of accrued leave. To fix this, enter an adjustment amount of 40 hours in the Estimated leave accrued adjustment field (40 hours + 40 hours = 80 hours, which is equivalent to 2 weeks at 40 hours per week), this changes their Definition of a week, but their available leave balance (in weeks) will not change.

For example:

• An employee works 20 hours per week and their annual leave balance is 4 weeks.
• If converted to hours, those 4 weeks equal 80 hours (4 weeks x 20 hours)
• The employee's work hours increase to 30 hours per week.
• Their annual leave balance will still be 4 weeks, but those 4 weeks are now equal to 120 hours (4 weeks x 30 hours).

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