Getting Started with Employee Leave Tracking

It's fairly common for new time clock software users to get their new time and attendance system all setup and functioning at a basic level and then come back several weeks or even months later and start deploying some of the 'bells and whistles'. Tracking vacation and sick time is one of those 'bells' that typically gets setup later.

Things to Think About

There are a couple of decisions that need to be made prior to setting up accrued and used leave tracking in Virtual TimeClock. The first is to decide what leave categories you'll be using. Your new time and attendance software already includes holiday, personal, sick leave, and vacation, but you can add as many new leave categories as you want.

The second decision is how you'll accrue paid time off. Leave benefits can be setup as either an annual award or a calculated award based on hours worked. An annual award is basically a lump sum that gets deposited into the user's leave account at the beginning of the benefit year. With a calculated award, employees have to actually work hours before any leave hours accrue and are available to be used. We've got complete instructions for setting up employee leave tracking with Virtual TimeClock.

Leave Balance Forwards

The tricky part of getting started tracking employee leave benefits with your new computer time clock is what to do when you've already been tracking leave accrual and paid time off with some other system. There are a couple of options for bringing over those leave balances from your other time tracking system depending on how you're accruing leave benefits.

If you're accruing leave benefits based on an annual award, then you can just enter the current employee balances as carryover into Virtual TimeClock and not worry about total accrual amounts until the next benefit year. If you're already accruing benefits based on a calculated award, then you can still enter current employee balances as carryover into Virtual TimeClock, but then you'll need to either adjust the calculation rate based on the time remaining in the current benefit year, or set the employee's award anniversary to the date you want to start using your new time clock software to accrue paid leave. Either way, you'll need to review the leave settings for each employee at the end of the benefit year.

Jeff Morrow

Time Clock Software Support Specialist

Redcort Software