How To Track Employee Leave With Virtual TimeClock


By Jeffery Morrow
Redcort Software

Virtual TimeClock is much more than a simple employee time clock software program. Virtual TimeClock makes it easy to track all employee time off, whether it's paid or unpaid. You can setup your time clock software according to your own employee leave or time off policies for easy and accurate time and attendance tracking, including those areas where you may have specific legal obligations, such as jury duty and military leave. Track all unpaid leave taken under the Family & Medical Leave Act (FMLA) or mandatory furlough. Instantly know which employees are currently off under FMLA and how much time they've taken, even if it's intermittent.

Setup different accrual rates based on your business rules; like seniority accrual, new employee accrual, and part-time employee accrual. The following steps will help you add your business time off policies to your employee time clock software.


Adding Leave Categories

Virtual TimeClock software comes with several common leave categories. These are holiday, personal, sick leave, and vacation. You can add as many additional leave categories as you want. From the Lists menu, choose Leave Categories. Click the + button beneath the list of leave categories. In the Name field, enter a unique leave category name. In the Calculations section, select the appropriate radio button to designate the leave category as paid, limited paid, or unpaid.

Paid leave is always included in the total hours worked for each employee. Limited paid is only included in the total hours worked up until the maximum minutes or hours threshold is reached. The remaining time will be reported as unpaid on the employee timecard report. Unpaid leave will not be included in the total hours worked for each employee.

Additional leave categories you may want to setup include funeral leave, jury duty, military leave, maternity leave, FMLA, furlough, unpaid sick leave, and unpaid personal leave.

Adding Worker Leave Awards

Now that you've created leave categories to match your business rules, it is time to enter employee leave benefits into your time clock program. Leave benefits are awarded to users as either an annual award or a calculated award based on hours worked. An annual award is basically a lump some that gets deposited into the user's leave account at the beginning of the benefit year. This means the full balance is immediately available for use (80 hours paid vacation per year). With a calculated award, employees have to actually work hours before any leave hours accrue and are available to be used (1 hour paid leave per 40 hours worked). This allows you to customize leave awards based on your benefit rules and for different lengths of service. Overtime hours can be optionally included as hours worked for the calculation of awards.

Each employee can have their own unique award anniversary for tracking benefit years, which may start on January 1, be the same as the employee hire date, or start at the end of a probationary period. Leave balances can also be carried over from a previous benefit year for each leave category.

From the Lists menu, choose Users. Click the Leave tab to open the leave panel for a selected user. You can now enter the award anniversary for each employee, new awards for the benefit year as either annual awards or calculated awards, and any leave carryover hours from the prior benefit year.

Recording Used Time Off

The next step for tracking time off with your employee time clock is to record when the time off was taken. You may even want to enter time off requests in advance. Enter paid holidays for the entire year each January for all of your employees at the same time. The leave entries won't display on worker timecards until the payroll period in which they occur.

Leave entries can be entered for an individual employee, or a group of employees at the same time, like when a manager needs to record a paid holiday for all workers in the department. After adding one or more leave entries, the Timecard Entry Editor window displays the newly created entries for review so they can be corrected or deleted as necessary.

From the Actions menu, choose Add Leave Entry. Select the worker or group of workers you want to add the leave entry for by quickly checking or unchecking worker names. Now just pick the leave type and dates. You can even add a note to the entry listing the holiday or any comments related to the time off request.

Checking Leave Balances

Once award anniversaries and accrual rates have been assigned to employees, a special report is needed to find out how much leave time employees have accrued, how much time they've used, and how much time off they have remaining for each leave category. The Accrued and Used Leave report is a helpful tool for determining how many leave hours each user has remaining for each leave category and can be accessed from the Reports menu at any time. Run the report through the end of your benefit year to help you know how many hours are available for carryover into the next benefit year.

For payroll reporting purposes, leave entries are reported and displayed on worker timecards with other entries for the date range selected. While they do not have a start and stop work time, the total hours recorded for the day are reflected in the appropriate column of the employee timecard report. You can even include paid leave hours in a separate column on the timecard report. Otherwise, all paid leave hours will be included in the regular hours column.


Using these simple guidelines, Virtual TimeClock software gives you the power and flexibility to easily track and report employee time and attendance according to your business rules.


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