There aren’t many benefits that employees enjoy more than paid time off (PTO). As a business owner or HR professional, you have the responsibility of explaining your vacation time policy, tracking vacation accrual, and deducting available hours/days as applicable.
The first thing you should do is decide on an accrual rate. Every type is based on the number of hours or days available per year, but you still need to select a rate to ensure accuracy throughout the year.
The most common vacation accrual rates include:
For example, employees could accrue two vacation days per month. At the start of each month, two days are added to their “bank.”
Another example is the annual accrual rate. With this, employees are awarded their vacation days for the year on January 1st.
With the help of your workforce—or a select group of employees—compare the pros and cons of each type of vacation accrual. This will help you choose the one that’s best for your company and your workers.
Now, let’s move on to three tips for tracking employee vacation accrual as part of your key HR metrics.
It’s one thing for you to know what type of vacation accrual system you’re using, but that’s not good enough. Clearly define this to your employees so that they know when they receive paid time off.
An employee vacation accrual template—such as one built in Excel—allows you to maintain a database of basic information such as:
An employee vacation accrual template is a viable solution if you only have a handful of employees, but it becomes much more complex as your team grows. Can you imagine manually tracking the PTO of 100+ employees? Not only would it take an extraordinary amount of time, but a manual system greatly improves the risk of error.
An employee vacation accrual calculator is helpful in many ways, but remember this: it’s only as good as the data you input. If you input an inaccurate number, you’ll arrive at an inaccurate result.
When using a calculator, some of the things to pay attention to include:
As long as you’re using accurate data, you can expect an employee vacation accrual calculator to save you time and eliminate mistakes.
Even if you know how to track employee vacation accrual, you’re still likely to have questions. Here are some frequently asked questions to address today:
Answering these questions, among others, will help you implement a more defined employee vacation accrual policy.
That’s a lot of information to process, but you’re not alone in figuring it out. At Oyster, it’s our mission to help you efficiently manage your workforce. And that means integrating a system for calculating and tracking paid time off.
With our help, you’ll never again waste unnecessary time tracking vacation accrual, or make a mistake that costs you and/or an employee time or money.
Visit our help center for more information on tracking PTO, onboarding global employees, managing remote contractors, and more.
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