Set Up Holiday Pay Policies for Time Off Calendar

This article covers setting up holiday pay policies for your company, which can pay automatically include paid holidays for employees and mark certain dates as 'worked holiday' for attendance employees.

Setting up a Holiday Pay Policy in Checkwriters is a process that will further streamline your payroll processing. A Holiday Pay Policy is a template feature that will automatically pay employees for a specific amount of holiday hours when a payroll processes containing dates defined by the payroll administrator.

To set up the policies, you will first want to go to HR Admin > Time Off Center > Holiday. This is where you will set up your group of Holiday dates. To set up a group, you would first select Add New in the top right corner:

This will prompt you to set up a name for the group. Typically, you can set up a group for the year. One you have determined a name for the group, hit Save.

The group will now appear in the Holiday area. Select 0 Holidays to add in dates:

On this screen, you will be able to select Add New to add in dates:

In the next screen, you can input a description for the holiday and then pick the date. You will also see two boxes – Attendance Worked Holiday and Pay Policy Time Off. Pay Policy Time Off is used for dates you would like to pay employees for as a day off. Worked Holiday only applies if your company is using Attendance and will be covered later in this guide.

The date you input here is what date the system will look for when processing payroll. For example, if your check date is 07/10/2020 with a pay period of 06/28/2020 – 07/04/2020, then the 07/10/2020 payroll will contain the holiday hours for the 4th of July. Keep in mind, if the holiday falls on a weekend and you are paying out holiday hours for the Friday before or Monday after, you would want to input that date.

You can input multiple dates for one holiday group. Once you are satisfied with the dates, you can hit the Cancel button on the bottom to be brought back to the main screen:

The next step is to head over to the Pay Policy area below Holiday. The Pay Policy is where you will assign the holiday group to specific groups that will determine how many hours of holiday pay the employee will receive. Once you are in the Pay Policy area, select Add New in the top right.

This will open the screen where you will set up pay policies. You can set up multiple policy names. For example, you can set up a Full-Time employee policy that pays out employees 8 hours for each holiday in a holiday group. You can also set up a Part-Time policy that pays out 4 hours for each holiday in a holiday group.

You would need to:

1. Enter in a Policy Name
2. Pull in the applicable Holiday Template (set up in the previous Holiday area)
3. Select the Earning Code you will like for the hours to be coded under (typically Holiday)
4. Select the Begin/End time for the hours (you would want this to equal the number of hours you want to pay out)

Once you have finished, you can select Save.

Once this step is complete, you will want to click the blue Generate button in the row for the policy. This will sync it to your calendar. THIS STEP MUST BE DONE EVERY TIME YOU ADJUST A PAY POLICY.

Once you have completed this step, the next part is to assign the pay policy to your employees. There are two ways to do this. The first method we will cover is right on the Pay Policy screen. To assign the pay policy to employees from this screen, select the blue Assignment button.

This will bring up a list of employees that you can assign. Check off the employees and then select Save.

The other method to assign pay policies is through the Status page. To do this, you will want to pull them up in HR Admin > Manage Employees > Employee Center by clicking the orange pencil next to their name.

After pulling up the employee, hit the Status button on the blue bar at the top. Once on the Status page, scroll down to the box labeled Pay Policy and pull in the applicable holiday pay policy. Once it is pulled in, you can hit Save. This will then start paying out the employee the dates that you indicated with each coming payroll!

If you decide to assign employees through the Pay Policy assignment method, or if you edit the pay policy in any way, please be sure to select the blue generate button. This must be done every time to ensure the changes are synced with the time off calendar!

Worked Holiday Setup – Attendance Only

Holiday Pay Policies can also be used to set up certain dates as ‘Worked Holiday’ for employees. When this box is checked, a box labeled Default Code will appear. In this box, you can select an earning code.

After these are saved and the policy is generated, then any hours worked on this date will automatically be recorded as the earning code you selected in the Default Code box. For example, if you have a Worked Holiday earning code that is set to pay at 1.5x the employee’s rate, then all hours worked on this date will be paid at the 1.5x rate.

Please note – if both Attendance Worked Holiday and Pay Policy Time Off are checked, then an employee will receive both the time off paid and the worked holiday pay if they happen to work that day. If the employee should not receive both if they work on that date, you will need to cancel the approved holiday request in the Time Off Calendar.

Just like before, this holiday template needs to be assigned to a Pay Policy in order for it to function properly. If you have employees who do not receive paid holidays off but do receive a differential for working on the holiday, the setup should resemble the below:

Please note that while there are set hours entered in the above screenshot, this will not actually apply these hours as time off to the employee unless Pay Policy Time Off is checked when defining the dates in the Holiday template. Once the worked holiday pay policy has been set up, you can assign it to your employees.