It is unlikely that a new employee will start work on exactly the same day that your company’s holiday year begins. Therefore, you may always have to work out a pro-rata allowance for them. In Focus, you need to set a yearly allowance before making adjustments in order to set an employee’s pro-rata allowance.

This guide will follow a Use Case to explain the following:

• Setting the employee’s yearly allowance
• Calculating the employee’s pro-rata allowance
• Setting the employee’s pro-rata allowance

Please note - this guide only applies to those employees who have a ‘fixed’ allowance.

Use Case

A new employee will be starting work on the 1st October, working a 5-day week. The company’s holiday year runs 1st Jan-31st Dec. Statutory holiday entitlement for an entire holiday year is 28 days. The employee only has the Personal leave channel.

Setting the employee’s yearly allowance

1. Select ‘Employees’ from the Menu Bar.
2. Select the required employee from the Employees Tree.
3. Select the ‘Absence’ tab.
4. In the ‘Absence’ section, select ‘Configure’.
5. In ‘Allowance’, input the total amount of an entire year’s holiday allowance (28).
6. Save.

Calculating the employee’s pro-rata allowance

There are several methods of finding out what the employees allowance would be for starting part way through the holiday year. One of these methods is the government’s official online calculator at https://www.gov.uk/calculate-your-holiday-entitlement 

It only takes a minute to complete. Simply work your way through the questions. When prompted, make sure you select ‘Do you want to work out holiday for someone starting part way through a leave year?’

In our Use Case, the statutory holiday entitlement is calculated as 7 days.

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Setting the employee’s pro-rata allowance

This is done by making an adjustment in the ‘Adjust’ field rather than changing their Allowance.

1. In order to give the employee the correct Total Allowance, simply enter the required value into the ‘Adjust’ field. We want to give them 7 days, so we ‘Adjust’ by -21 days.
2. Save.

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The Total Allowance now shows the correct amount as 7, the employee’s pro-rata entitlement.

Additional information

Public leave channel

If you have the Public leave channel enabled, you may need to calculate the employee’s allowance differently. In our example below, we’ve separated the yearly allowances in 20 Personal and 8 Public and split the 7 days accordingly in order to work out the ‘Adjust’ totals.

Default Yearly Allowances

You can set Default Yearly Allowances in the ‘Absence’ tab of the Employee Form.

These allowances will automatically be applied at the start of a new holiday year, as long as the employee is employed when the new holiday starts. Although setting these won’t have any immediate effect, it may be useful to set them up when you are creating a new employee.

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