Q: Dealing with holidays

By recording the days your employee normally works - their working pattern, your software can correctly calculate holiday entitlement and outstanding holidays. Holiday working patterns are set up at a company level and assigned to an employee in their Employee Record.

Tip: For example, if an employee works Monday to Friday, their working pattern is NQQQQQN. N = days they don't work (in this case Saturday & Sunday) and Q = the days they do (in this case Monday to Friday). When you enter their holidays your software recognises that Saturday and Sunday are not normal working days and does not deduct them from their holiday entitlement.

To check the patterns set up > Company > Settings > Absence tab. Working patterns are assigned to an employee in their employee record. Find out more.

Yes, you can. For example, you might need to do this for shift workers.

If you assign more than one pattern to a scheme, your software uses the Pattern Start Date to ensure that holidays are correctly calculated for the first week the pattern applies to, and any subsequent weeks.

For employees who work part-time or irregular hours, accruing their holidays in hours, instead of days or weeks, ensures that they receive the minimum number of holidays allowed under the European Working Time Directive. To do this in your software, you must use a holiday scheme set to calculated entitlement, the employee must be paid by the hour in Enter Payments, and the relevant Pay Elements must have the Include in Weekly Averages check box selected.

Yes, you can do this using Global Changes. First, select the employees you want to assign a scheme to from the Employee List. From the Tasks menu, choose Global Changes > Holidays > Assign Employee(s) to Scheme Number.

Select the scheme you want to assign to the employees from the drop-down list and click OK. Confirm the number of employees you have selected by clicking Yes when prompted. Finally, click OK when you see the message confirming that the selected employees have been updated.

Select Company > Holidays > National Holidays. From the Area drop-down list, choose the appropriate region.

The list provided displays the national holidays specific to the region selected. Use the tree view to see the dates for the appropriate year.

No. If you want to use different dates specific to your company, you need to create your own customised list. To find out how, please refer to the next question and answer.

Yes. Select Company > Holidays > National Holidays. From the Area drop-down list, choose Custom.

Click New and use the Description drop-down list to select the national holiday you want to use. The date box is completed for you, but you can change it if required. Click OK and repeat this process for the other national holidays you want to add to your list.

Next you can add you own dates. Enter the description you want to use in the box provided, then enter the appropriate date. Click OK and repeat this process for the other dates you want to add to your list.

When you have finished, click OK.

Yes. Select Company > Holidays > National Holidays. From the Area drop-down list, choose Custom. From the list provided, select the holiday you want to remove and click Delete, then click Yes.

Note: You can only remove national holidays that you have set up for your company.

There is no statutory right to paid leave on national or public holidays. Whether your employees are paid for this time off is at the company's discretion, and should be stated in their terms of employment. In addition, national holidays can be counted towards employees' statutory annual leave of 5.6 weeks, or counted separately - again, this is up to the individual company.