Everybody looks forward to their holidays, and keeping track of them hasn’t got to be time consuming and a nightmare with Sage 50 Payroll. There are a variety of holiday settings that enable you to set up different holiday schemes, assign them to employees and much more. This will take the stress out of recording holidays with Sage 50 Payroll, and make the thought of them much more enjoyable.
A useful tip: within Company Settings, check the ‘Update Absence Diary Automatically’ box. This ensures that when you run the payroll and update your records, the booked holidays within the absence diary will automatically change to taken. If this box is not ticked, then you will have to change this manually by going to the absence diary for each relevant employee, right clicking on the ‘booked’ days and selecting taken from the drop down menu. If you have a large company then this can be a huge inconvenience and a drain on your time.
Within the Company Task bar, you will see a ‘Holidays’ menu. Selecting this will allow you to create/ edit Holiday Schemes. It is useful to set up your holiday schemes based on your company and then applying the schemes to the relevant employees. There are many different options within this section, and you can customise the holiday schemes to suit your company’s needs. If you know how many holidays your employees are entitled to then it is easier to use the ‘Specified Entitlement’ option and input the number of days/ hours/ weeks. You can also choose to include national holidays within the holiday entitlement, and if your company allows it you can also select an option that allows holiday entitlement to be brought forward from the previous year.
Within the settings tab, you can also set up the working day patterns. This is dependent on your company and the employee’s working day patterns. For example, an employee who works Monday – Friday would be N-Q-Q-Q-Q-Q-N, N being Non-Qualifying days in this case Saturday and Sunday, and Q being the Qualifying days that are worked.
To assign a Holiday Scheme to an employee you need to select the employee and go to Absence Tab. Then you need to select the Holiday option which will bring up the Scheme information and the ability to change this. To assign a particular Holiday Scheme to a number of employees then you should highlight the relevant employees, and go to Global Changes within Tasks. Hovering over the Holiday section will bring up more options and you need to select ‘Assign Employee(s)’ to Scheme Number’. You can then choose the scheme you wish to allocate to the selected employees.
This is just one of the many things that can be utilised within Sage 50 Payroll software to make your life easier! We’ll be covering topics regarding holiday tracking and reports in future blogs!