🎯 For admins and HR managers in the UK looking to set up leave for their irregular workers and part-year workers.
On 1 January 2024, the UK government introduced a new Holiday entitlement reform for irregular workers and part-year workers that will come into effect on 1 April 2024. For businesses starting their holiday year before 1 April 2024, holiday entitlement calculations for irregular hours and part-year workers should remain unchanged in 2024 and the new legislation would only apply from the next holiday year. In such cases, it’s recommended to use the Calendar Week method. Businesses starting their holiday year on or after 1 April, 2024 must adopt the new legislation by the start of the holiday year.
If you are unsure of what leave employment terms are correct for your business or your employees, we encourage you to visit gov.uk or seek legal advice.
Note: Depending on the language setting on your profile, references to Leave below may appear as Absence in your Planday organisation. These terms both refer to the same thing in Planday.
Step 1: Create the new leave policy
Create the new leave account template by navigating to Settings > Leave & Overtime > Policies and clicking the blue Create policy button.
Choose one of the Predefined set of rules, either Annual Leave (Accrued Daily) or Annual Leave (Accrued Hourly).
Define the Accruing period’s start date and select the Shift types that are used to calculate the accrued balance and leave pay and click on Create.
Note: A week with one or more shifts using any of the shift types selected here will count towards the calculation and accrue leave. Any week that consists exclusively of shift types that are not selected here will not be included in the calculation and will not accrue leave.
Edit the policy you’ve just created and fill out additional settings for the new policy:
What Employee types, Departments, Employee groups should be eligible for this leave policy
Allow negative balance or not
Allow carry-over or not
Set a salary code for payroll
Choose the Bank Holiday calendar that should be tied to the Policy
Choose the default shift type for overlapping shifts
Note: Make sure you disable the Renew automatically option as you’ll need to be using the new Holiday entitlement after your holiday year expires.
Step 2: Create new leave accounts based on the new policy created at step 1
Create the new leave accounts by navigating to Schedule > Leave accounts > click the blue Manage leave button > Create accounts.
Click Create accounts for multiple employees.
Select the leave policy you created in step 1 from the Account name list and click Next.
In the screen below, you can limit who will get the new accounts by department or employee type in the Assign section if necessary. In the Start Date section, set this to Same start date for all employees and use the first day of your new leave year. All other settings have defaults that are pulled from the leave policy created at step 1 and can be left as they are.
Click Save. You will see a message pop up at the bottom of the screen advising how many accounts were just created.
Step 3: Transfer any future leave requests to the new accounts
Since we are changing over to new leave accounts, any leave requests submitted for next leave year against the old accounts will need to be denied and re-submitted against the new account created at step 2.
To assist this step and to have a record of these requests, export a report of leave requests for next leave year by navigating to Schedule > Leave requests, then Export > Leave report. In the new window:
Set the dates for the next leave year (e.g. 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024).
Untick the Denied status.
Tick Show details for a more detailed breakdown of each leave request, or leave it unticked to just see the date range of the requests.
Click the green Print Report button and once it has loaded, click the Download File link that appears next to the Close link. This is your excel leave request report.
Re-enter, or have the employees re-enter, the future leave requests making sure to choose the new leave accounts created at step 2. You can do this by navigating to Schedule > Leave requests, clicking the blue Register leave button, and following the steps there.
Since you have the report of the leave requests you created earlier, you can now deny all leave requests for next leave year against the accounts we are changing from. This is a necessary step to delete the old accounts and avoid double accruing in both accounts.
Navigate to Schedule > Leave requests.
Set the Period start date to the first day of your next leave year (e.g. 1 January 2024).
Set the status to show both Pending and Approved requests.
Filter to the leave account we are changing from by clicking the Additional filters button and selecting the old account name in the Account Names dropdown.
Once the above filters are set you now have a list of all approved or pending leave requests for next leave year against the account we are changing away from.
Open each leave request in this list and click the red Deny button. In the popup confirmation window untick Send notification to the employee and click the red Deny button again.
Step 4: Delete old leave accounts
Once all leave requests in the old accounts have been denied in step 3, we can proceed to delete those leave accounts which have been replaced for the next leave year.
Navigate to Schedule > Leave accounts
Set the Period start date to the first day of your next leave year (e.g. 1 January 2024)
Click Additional filters and choose the old leave account name from the Account names dropdown. This is your list of all accounts for the next leave year from the old leave policy account template.
Hover over the first account and click the delete button that appears on the far right. In the popup confirmation window, click the red Delete button. If successful, you will get a message at the bottom of the screen with a tick advising it has been successful. If you get an error here, it is likely there is still an approved or pending leave request for this account that needs to be denied.
Once all of the above steps are complete, you have changed over from your old leave policy to the new leave policy in time for the new leave year.
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