Whether you work in the healthcare industry or use a Payroll integration, automatically including holiday information in Payroll can be a time-saver.

​Setting up a fixed leave account in Planday is a good way to make sure that your employees get a set number of days/hours off paid out per year, according to their contract and Shift types allows you to send your schedule information to Payroll automatically.

The leave is represented as a shift within integrations like Xero, Sage or QuickBooks.
This article will help you set up Planday, so leave-related payout can almost work automatically.

Typically, a Leave account (or Absence account) is attached to an Employee type. An Employee can only be set to one Employee type at a time, so that makes managing leave accounts a bit easier.

Fixed leave accounts are usually connected to Employees with a monthly salary, as it does not provide holiday costs for Payroll. However, this article will show you how to extract the Payroll information from Fixed leave accounts.

In some scenarios, like in the Healthcare industry, leave is calculated based on the individual's weekly contract ( e.g., Annual leave no. of hours = 5.6 x Weekly working hours). This case fits in between what would be standard practice for using either a Fixed leave account (typically used for the salaried Employee types) or an Accrued leave account (often used for Hourly-paid Employee types).

In the healthcare scenario, an employee with a 40-hour workweek contract will need a Fixed leave account of 224 hours.
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To make this work, you'll need to set up an Employee type per weekly contract. Go to Settings > People > General, and create your Employee type.
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You'll need an Employee type for each kind of contract (below you can see an example for an organization with only two contract types: a 36 hours/week contract and a 40 hours/week contract). This is necessary because the initial balance in the leave account will be different based on the number of hours/week specified in the contract.
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After creating the necessary Employee types, go to Settings > Leave & Overtime > Account Templates > Create > Leave account and create an account for each of your contracts.

Here's an example of a 40 hours/week contract:

Give your leave template a name. You can choose whether this configuration should renew each year automatically.

Using the previous formula (5.6 x weekly working hours), the annual hourly holiday entitlement for this type of contract will be 224 hours per employee, which means that the Initial value on this vacation account is 224, and the Accruing in mode should be in hours.

It is essential to connect the vacation account to the correct Employee type, to ensure that only the employees with the right Employee type are eligible to use this specific Vacation Account.
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You can now assign this Leave account to your employees by assigning their correspondent Employee type via the dropdown menu in the Edit employee window. As a reminder, an employee's profile can be found from People > click on the name of the employee > Edit > and set the Employee type.
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Handling Vacation for an hourly member of staff using a Fixed Account is a two-part process.
The booking process remains the same: either the employee sends you a Vacation request, or you can book in the Vacation for them, from Schedule → Leave requests (or Absence requests).
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Choose the employee and the date range. Then mark which days should be 'paid' holiday (and deducted from their account balance), and which days should be 'unpaid' (and have no effect on the account balance).
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Here's an example for an employee that regularly works 8 hours per day, Monday to Friday (40 hours/week):
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Make sure to take a look at the account balance section, to check whether the calculated deductions are correct:
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Leave a message if you want to, and approve the holiday.

Then move on to the next step to connect the approved holiday to Payroll.
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As the vacation request on its own has no links to Payroll, you will need to make that connection through Shifts from your schedule. That way, the correct payment will register automatically.
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Go to the Schedule > Employee view and find the Vacation. Remember that you can use Filters to see only the employees you need. The view should look like this:
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For each day of the Vacation period (marked in the Schedule), you will need to create a Shift that uses a specific Shift type (for instance, a Shift type called Holiday monthly salaried).
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The Shift will need a Start and End time corresponding to the number of hours deducted from the vacation account balance for that day.
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In the example with the 40 hours/week employee, each Shift would be 8 hours long.
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The Shift type and each Shift will ensure that the payment is calculated correctly and linked to Payroll.
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To avoid confusion, you should create a specific Shift type and use it only for Vacation payments. You can read more about how to create and use Shift types here.
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When you've finished creating Shifts (of the Vacation Shift type), your schedule should look like this:
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As you can see on the left-hand side, underneath the employee's name, they now have 40 hours of Vacation time registered for this week, which will automatically be reported to Payroll.

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