Leave Allowance Templates

A Leave Allowance Template will help make managing leave for employees much easier.

With leave allowance templates, you’re able to create pre-defined sets of leave accrual values which can then be applied to new and existing employees. This then allows you to bulk update leave values for employees if the leave accrual rates or accrual methods change rather than having to update them individually for each new employee.  

Any business created from 28 August 2020 will have three default leave allowance templates configured, one for casual employees and two for permanent employees. The difference between the permanent employee leave allowance templates are as follows:

• Permanent Leave - No Loading: this template does not include a 17.5% annual leave loading. Additionally, the accrual and balance of personal/carer's leave is set in hours as opposed to days.
• Permanent Leave - With Loading: this template includes a 17.5% annual leave loading. Additionally, the accrual and balance of personal/carer's leave is set in hours as opposed to days.

Prior to 28 August 2020, the leave allowance templates - "Permanent Leave - No Loading (10 PCL days)" and "Permanent Leave - With Loading (10 PCL days)" - was also added to businesses by default. These leave allowance templates were configured so that the accrual method and balance for personal/carer's leave was calculated in days as opposed to hours in accordance with the Full Federal Court of Australia's decision on 21 August 2019. 

On 13 August 2020, the High Court handed down a decision regarding the method of accruing personal/carer’s leave under the National Employment Standards. This decision overturns the previous decision made by the Full Federal Court in August 2019. As such, we have removed "Permanent Leave - No Loading (10 PCL days)" and "Permanent Leave - With Loading (10 PCL days)" from our default list of leave allowance templates. 

You can use these templates as is or change the settings within to suit your business OR you can create your own.

Setting up new leave allowance templates

1. To setup a new leave allowance template, go to the 'Payroll Settings' > 'Leave Allowance Templates' page. Here you will see a list of the existing Leave Allowance Templates and will display the number of employees that are linked to that template:
   
   You can click on the number of employees linked to the template 'link' to see the details of all active and terminated employees linked to the template: 
   
   
   
2.  Click on 'Add' to add a new template and fill in the relevant details. You’ll notice that only leave categories that automatically accrue leave are displayed in the Leave Allowances section. Enter a Template Name and then select the leave categories you want activated (i.e. you want employees to access) for this template.  
   
   

   
   
   

3. You will notice above that each leave category listed under Leave Allowances has an override button. Clicking on override will allow you to enter different values to that of the default. When you click on the left of the 'x' to activate the override, the default values will disappear and then you are able to enter a new set of values for that specific leave category. Then click “Save” and your leave template will be created.
   
   

      
   
   

4. Now when you create a new employee, you will be able to select a leave allowance template that can be applied to this employee. You can also select a leave template for existing employees through the Leave Allowances page of the employee file.
   
   

   
   
   

5. Finally, if you do need to make changes to the values in the leave template, you can do so. Once you click save you’ll be notified if there are employees already linked to the leave template and you’ll be asked if you want to apply the changes to all linked employees (this includes active & inactive employees)::
   
   

   
   
   

Copying a leave allowance template

You are able to copy a leave allowance template, which is handy if you need to create another slightly different template. Once you copy it, you just need to change the name, make the required changes and click 'save'. 

In order to copy the template, go to the Payroll settings > Leave allowance template page and hover over the template that you want to copy. Click the 'copy' icon as shown below:

Once you do that, another template will be added underneath with the same name, appended by 'copy'. 

If you have any feedback or questions on the employee leave templates feature, please send us an email at support@roubler.com.