For many businesses, managing employee leave can be confusing, time-consuming and just plain hard. From keeping track of multiple leave balances, often with different accrual rates or entitlement rules, to managing the approval process and any associated scheduling impacts, employee leave creates unnecessary stress and takes precious time away from the important tasks associated with running a business.
At Deputy, it’s our mission to simplify how you manage your team, and save you from the mundane admin of running a business. That’s why we’ve introduced a bunch of new features to make managing employee leave in Deputy easier and faster, so you can spend more time doing what you love. These updates include:
Manually edit employee leave balances
Bulk update multiple employee leave balances
View leave balance in Hours or Days, based on the type of leave
Set a “reset” date for leave balances (e.g. annually or on work anniversary)
Performance improvements to the leave extension.
To help you make the most of this release, and ultimately save you from the complexity of managing employee leave manually, we’ve written a step by step guide for how to get started managing employee leave in Deputy.
When set up right, it’s super easy for Deputy to be your single-source of truth for employee leave, meaning you no longer have to maintain multiple sources (like your payroll provider, or even the old excel spreadsheet), and any availability impacts can be immediately managed when approving leave and creating your schedule.
To get you set up and running we’ve broken leave management into 4 important parts, which we’ll step through now.
Setting up pay rates and leave conditions
Importing and updating balances
Setting up Accrual & Deduction
Managing leave with employees
If you still need help after reading the following, please reach out to our 24/7 support team!
1. Setting up Pay Rates and Creating Leave Conditions
The first, and one of the most important steps in setting up your business to manage leave in Deputy is to set up your employees pay rates, then create the required leave conditions for your business. A Leave Condition is simply a type of leave you have set up in Deputy, like Vacation Leave or Sick Leave.
To assign an employee with pay rates, head to their profile and select the Pay Rates tab. From here you can select the pay structure you would like to apply using the drop down menu and enter the associated pay rates. For more information about setting up an employee’s pay rates, check out this help document.
By default, when you assign an employee with pay rates they are allocated the following leave conditions:
Annual Leave (Vacation)
Sick (Personal/Carer’s) Leave
Unpaid Leave
Those using our in-built Awards may notice different default leave conditions depending on the requirements of each award.
While these conditions are the most commonly used by customers who don’t use in-built Awards, we understand every business is unique in their leave policies and requirements, so we make it super easy to modify the default conditions or create your own entirely.
Modifying Leave Conditions
To modify the details of a leave condition, Navigate to Global Settings > Leave > Leave Rules. From here you can change the rules of a Leave Condition by clicking the associated paper and pencil icon. For each leave condition you can select:
Whether it is Paid or Unpaid
Whether the balance resets to a chosen amount, or simply or rolls over (e.g. at beginning of each year)
Whether it should be displayed in days or hours. (Note: For leave types that you elect to view in days, you will need to ensure you accurately set your employees standard work hours)
You can even choose if the balance is visible to your employees or not.
Note: For ease of use, please do not change the “Leave Accrual Calculation” here. All Leave Accrual rules should be set using the extension in your Location Settings, outlined in section 3.
Creating New Leave Conditions
To provide further flexibility, you can create your own leave conditions. To create a leave condition, simply select ‘new leave condition’. From here you can choose the type of leave it will be (e.g. Vacation Leave, Sick Leave), and customise the rules to reflect how that leave is applied in your business.
Setting up multiple leave conditions is particularly useful if you have a single leave type that has different accrual rates for different employees (Full time vs Part time), or if you have some employees that accrue in days (e.g. salary workers) and some in hours (casual workers). Note, actual accrual rates are set when using the leave extension, outlined below.
Whenever you create a new leave condition, you will need to ensure it is allocated to all employees on the relevant Pay Rates (known as Employment Terms for our more advanced users). This is done slightly differently for Premium and Enterprise customers.
Premium
Head to https://[yourdomain].[region].deputy.com/exec/administration/workforce/employment_contracts
Identify the Pay Rate (Employment Term) relevant to the specific employee(s) and then select Edit.
Browse to the Leave Conditions tab.
Click ‘Add Leave Conditions’.
Select the new ‘Leave Condition’ you have just created in your Global Settings.
Note: We understand this part can get a bit tricky for Premium customers. If you have any problems, please reach out to our 24/7 support team who will be more than happy to help you out!
Enterprise
Head to the Enterprise tab and then select ‘Employment Terms’.
Identify the Employment term relevant to the specific employees and then select Edit.
Browse to the Leave Conditions tab.
Click ‘Add Leave Conditions’.
Select the new ‘Leave Condition’ you have just created in your Global Settings
Note: If you do not set up your employees Pay Rates, or if you do not allocate newly created Leave Conditions to the relevant employees, the accrual and deduction extension will not work.
2. Importing and updating leave balances
Leave balances can be manually updated or imported in multiple ways in Deputy. While we won’t go into all the detail here, you can check out this help document if you need more information.
In summary, there are 4 ways to import or update and employees leave balance in Deputy:
Manually editing a single employees balance through the employees profile
Bulk update multiple employees leave balances through the people tab
Import via csv file through the people tab
Sync with payroll or HR provider
Manually editing and bulk updating employee leave balances allows you to simply and quickly make changes to employees balances in Deputy, or manually reset your employees balances at a certain time each year.
While importing via csv is useful when you have a large number of employees and you manage leave balances in multiple places (like with your payroll provider or accountant).
If you manage leave in your payroll or HR system instead of, or alongside Deputy, then activating the integration and syncing your leave balance directly is a great way to save time and effort, as you don’t have to manually update 2 or more systems. For now, Deputy syncs leave with the following partners:
Xero
MYOB AR
Gusto
BambooHR
FlareHR
ADP WFN
For more information about how to set up an integration with you payroll or HR provider, and how to sync your leave balances, please check out this help document. Note: Leave balances typically only sync with your payroll provider when you run payroll.
Updating and syncing leave is a great way way to manage employees leave balances at a single point in time, however, if we currently don’t support your payroll/HR provider there’s no need to worry! We have an in-house simple and accurate way to manage leave balance on an ongoing basis. Power up the Deputy leave extension for automatic accrual and deduction to seamlessly manage your employees leave. For more about how to do this, read on!
3. Setting up Accrual and Deduction
All leave accruals and deductions in Deputy are calculated using our leave extension, which can be found in your location settings. While you can manually update and edit leave balances using the methods above, using the extension allows your employees to automatically accrue and deduct their leave based on approved timesheets – meaning no manual work is required on your end!.
To set up accrual and deduction rules for a given leave condition, you need to head to Location Settings, then select the Notifications & Integrations tab. From here you will need to set up individual accrual and deduction rules for each type of leave.
To do this, search “Approved timesheet/Leave Request” using the search bar, and click “Activate”. Within the following screen, select the type of leave condition (or Leave Rule) you want to set up accruals and deductions for, set the accrual rate, and select whether you want it to apply for all locations and to accrue while on paid leave. Then click save.
Completing this step will mean that all employees at the given location (or all locations if you chose this setting) will accrue that specific leave at the specified rate, whenever a timesheet is approved. And when a leave timesheet is approved for that specific leave, the amount of hours or days submitted will be deducted from that specific leave balance.
Note: If you simply want the extension to deduct leave from an existing balance just set the accrual rate to 0. This is useful for managing leave types where employees are entitled to a ‘bank’ of days at the beginning of each year, and therefore do not accrue leave.
Remember you can also choose to view and accrue each type of leave in days or hours, and set a date and value for the leave balance to reset if required (for example, at the beginning of each year, or on an employees work anniversary). This needs to be done in your global settings (see the first section).
If you want to accrue and deduct leave for multiple leave conditions, you will need to repeat the above for each one. You will then see multiple instances of the extension bar in the Notifications & Integrations list.
4. Managing leave with employees
In Deputy it’s super simple for employees to view their leave balance (if you have enabled this setting) and apply for leave. To view their leave balance all they need to do is check out their profile by clicking the drop-down box in the top-right corner and selecting ‘My Profile’.
From here they can scroll down to view the balances of all leave types for which this is enabled. They can also view leave on all our mobile apps. Check out this help document for more information on how employees can view and apply for leave in Deputy.
And that’s it! Once you have followed the above steps, you can simply manage employee leave in Deputy, saving you time and effort, and helping you stay compliant with local leave policy laws. Managing leave doesn’t have to be hard, and in Deputy we make it as easy as possible, so you can spend less time doing admin and more time doing what you love!
