Preventing Negative Leave Balances in a Pay Run

Having a negative leave balance means that an employee takes paid time off before they have accrued it. In other words, the employer is advancing or loaning their employee the wages for the paid time off they take before they have earned it. Employment Hero Payroll have recently introduced a setting which prevents negative leave balances from being processed in the pay.

• Disable negative leave balances - Setup 

   

  Set the leave category

  • Navigate to payroll settings > leave categories 
  • Select the leave category you would like to apply this to.
  • Check the setting for 'Prevent negative leave balances'. Please note this      option will only be visible if the Employee leave Balance is set to Tracked

   

  

   

  • Once this has been selected, a drop down menu will be visible. This will show a list of leave categories in the dropdown menu which are set to: 'Don't pay for the leave taken' and have the same unit type as the selected leave category.
  • Select Save.

   

  Create Leave Request 

  • Once you have the leave category setup, when you apply for a leave request which has a value with more hours then available leave balance, a warning will display advising that the balance cannot go below zero and a portion of unpaid leave may be applied.
  • When viewing the leave requests as an administrator,  traffic light highlight shows to indicate whether there is enough leave to cover the request when entering the leave details.
    Green = There are enough hours.
    Red = There are not enough hours accrued.
    Orange = If there are multiple pending leave requests and the available balance will not cover all of these requests.

When running a pay run, any leave requests associated to the pay period will be visible in the 'leave requests' tab. 

By enabling the negative leave balance setting, the way the units that are paid and unpaid are presented will be affected. Employees that have request leave for a leave category which prevents a negative leave balance may have unpaid units. 

If they request leave for a leave category that allows negative leave balances, they will only have paid units and could have a negative leave balance that needs to be 'earned' back.