Family and Domestic Violence Leave

Effective from 12 December 2018, the Fair Work Act includes an entitlement to Family and Domestic Violence Leave as part of the National Employment Standards.

The entitlements consist of 5 days unpaid per year and applies to all employees (full time, part time and casual). Click here to access further information on this new leave entitlement.

As a result, a new leave category for Family and Domestic Violence Leave has been added as part of the default leave categories provided in the system. The settings have been configured as follows:

Depending on your circumstances, you may need to update some existing business settings to ensure employee leave settings are fully updated for this new leave category. Instructions on completing the setup are as follows:

Scenario 1: Adding a new business to your account

The new leave category will be available as part of the default setup. Additionally, the default Leave Allowance Templates provided - ie 'Permanent Leave - No Loading'; 'Permanent Leave - With Loading' and 'Casual Leave' - will incorporate this new leave category. Basically, you won't need to do any additional work to setup the leave category. 

Scenario 2: Existing business with Award(s) installed 

As you would be aware, the entitlement to Family and Domestic Violence Leave came into effect from 1 August 2018 for all Award employees. As such, the new leave category is already set up in your business and no further configuration is required for your Award employees.

If you have employees in the business however that are not Award covered, you will need to ensure that any Leave Allowance Templates used for non-Award employees are updated. To do this, click on the relevant leave allowance template name to expand the settings. You will notice that the Family and Domestic Violence Leave leave category is not activated:

To activate click on the left of the toggle and then click on 'Save'. If there are employees already attached to the leave allowance template, the following pop up will appear:

You must click "OK" so that the existing leave settings for employees are also updated.   

Scenario 3: Existing business with no Award(s) installed

The new leave category has now been added to your business.

You will need to ensure that the settings for any Leave Allowance Templates are updated to incorporate the new leave category. Instructions on how to do this can be found in the Scenario 2: Existing business with Award(s) installed.  

Hiding Leave Categories

The various leave categories can have their balances and accruals be configured to show (or not show) on pay slips and in the employee portal. Further information can be found here. 

How the system manages the accrual of this new "rolling" leave type

This type of leave has to accrue in one hit / in advance / and no balance is carried over.  

Part of the way we manage this type of leave includes only considering a FULL pay period to be the first pay period of an employee's leave year.  

This means that unless an employee's start date lines up with the pay cycle exactly, the first pay run a new employee is paid in will be considered a partial pay.  This being the case, the system effectively treats this first/partial pay run as the last pay of the employee's "previous" leave year. 

In practice, what happens is all new employees will get a 38 hour allocation in their first pay run.

If the employee's start date is not the start date of the first pay period then, in the employee's second pay run (which is the first FULL pay of the employee's new leave year) the system will perform the normal/annual rollover process, ie.:

• negate the unused portion of leave (using a negative leave adjustment)
• add a fresh allocation of 38 hours (leave accrued).

Unless an employee actually "takes" this type of leave, their Family and Domestic Violence leave balance should always be 38 hours - and if you let the system manage the leave accruals (as described above, without interference) this will be the result.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us via support@roubler.com.