On Employee Types and Accruals
Of course being a Time and Attendance software package Time Clock MTS focuses primarily on Employees. Each employee can be classified by Employment Type. When Time Clock MTS was designed these employment types were thought to be things like ‘full time’, or ‘seasonal’, or ‘contract’ or whatever sorts of employment types you might need. This classification is of course useful for reporting and sorting purposes.
As time has progressed our users have found that it is also very useful for setting up of Vacation and Sick Time Accruals. These accruals, rather than being set by employee, are set by employee type. This allows you to have just a few accrual policies that cover all of your employees. This sort of ease of use is great, except where companies have unusual accrual schemes, or many different schemes. While Time Clock MTS cannot handle every different accrual scheme automatically, it does have the flexibility to allow you to handle them manually. An accrual scheme that we have been asked about is one that allocates vacation time based on years of service. This is different to the assumed scheme in Time Clock MTS which assumes a basic accrual over time calculation system, and cannot handle the years of service based system automatically. However, it can handle it through creative use of Employee Types.
Let’s say you have a scheme that allocates 1 week of yearly vacation time for each year of service up to a maximum of 4 weeks. All you need to do is create 4 different employee types, perhaps calling them ‘1 Year of Service’, ‘2 Years of Service’, ‘3 Years of Service’,and ‘4+ Years of Service’. Create a vacation accrual scheme for each employment type to have an initial amount of 1, 2, 3, and 4 weeks accordingly. Then you can go ahead and assign your employees to the correct employment type and they’ll now all be allocated the correct vacation time. Each year at the same time (the end of the fiscal year would be good) work your way through your employee list and make sure to allocate each of them to the correct employment type again.
For more information you might find our Setting Up Vacation Accruals article helpful. The Employment Type Help Topic is also worth a look.