‘employment contracts’ or ‘employment contract configurations’ are sets of rules followed to cost employee shifts. They can also be used to alert or warn about potential compliance issues around and pay.
employment contracts setup
The Ento employment contracts interpretation engine is powerful, providing a lot of flexibility, and is able to handle complex scenarios like ‘Overtime on a public holiday which falls after hours on a Sunday’, which can be incredibly complex. While we recommend becoming familiar with what each employment contracts controls and how it works, for any changes to the employment contracts we recommend getting in touch with our Support team.
To view your employment contracts settings, go to Payroll & Leave > employment contracts and click Edit.
Conditions
Conditions are ways of identifying variables that affect shifts. When conditions combine they create ‘rules’, which are used to assign specific earning rates in each employment contract configuration.
This can be a simple ‘X hours into the shift’, ‘if shift falls on a public holiday’, or ‘after 76 hours in the pay cycle’, right through to more complex rules like “after 10 hours into the shift, on a public holiday, and when working in a role called Supervisor’.
The ‘During certain times of the week’ condition now allows for consideration of time within time bands. A common example would be for After Hours. ‘After hours’ are often different times on weekdays and weekends. So the ‘After Hours’ condition ‘During certain times of the week’ would cover any hours worked in the defined time band on any day, and another would be created for ‘After Hours > 2 hrs’. Once employees have worked 2 hours in the specified time band, a different earning rate can be paid.
This accounts for any break taken, could pay OT x 1.5 (150% or ‘Time and a half’), for the first two hours, and OT x 2.0 (200% or ‘Double time’) for any hours worked after that.
employment contract configuration changes are required when adding new conditions. Each condition needs all possible ‘rules’ generated, and mapped to the applicable earning rates. This is necessary, so when the new condition occurs in conjunction with another condition or conditions, the ‘rule’ is mapped to the right earning rate.
Ento’s Award Interpreter Fact Sheet & Pricing Guide covers the various employment contracts levels, and costs for Awards as a Service.
Earning rates
Earning rates are the cost consequences of conditions being met, whether that’s a single condition or multiple conditions triggered at once. An example could be “between 5pm and 11pm on a Saturday” and “over 76 hours into the pay cycle“. These conditions can each occur separately, and at the same time.
These rates are usually a percentage of the employees hourly pay rate, such as 200% or ‘double time’, or 150% which is ‘time and a half’, but can also be fixed dollar amounts, for example, a $3.50 per shift loading may be an allowance paid for performing supervisor duties.
Rates can also have a limit – the minimum or maximum number of times it can be added within the selected instance, such as per shift, per week or per hours. Most loadings do not have limits, but they can also be used to enforce limitation, for example limit payment of the ordinary hours rate to 38 hours per week for salaried employees who do not work overtime.
Additional alerts
Additional alerts are checks that are run as you schedule. They perform like conditions without any attached loading, and can highlight instances that will have higher cost, such as overtime, or warn to assist with employment contract compliance.
Number of consecutive days off, maximum days to be worked consecutively, minimum number of hours required between shifts or break requirement for shifts of a certain length are the types of alerts managed here.
Alerts can be set as either low or critical, and each manager permission profile can be set to highlight, warn or block the of shifts that violate these alert rules. Read more in the article on Manager Permissions.
TOIL configuration
These settings determine how TOIL, or Time off in Lieu, works for those on employment contracts that utilise this feature. Here is where the types of hours that can be converted to TOIL are specified, whether employees are required to pre-approve TOIL, etc. Affected hours can then be converted to TOIL from Time & Attendance > Review Timesheets, adding to the TOIL balance, which can be used when they apply for TOIL Vacation.
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Vacation types
Each vacation type can be turned on or off for each employment contract, and can be set for employees to be able to request each vacation type themselves, or can be set so a manager would submit that type of request for them.
In general, if the employment contract is for casual employees, unless you are using some unpaid vacation types to assist with monitoring casual employees calling in sick etc, all vacation types for casuals are set to ‘Not Available’.
Vacation types, whether they are linked to a vacation balance, and if they should skip public holidays, is managed Payroll & Vacation > Vacation types.
Vacation accrual rates
Vacation accrual rates are the amount of hours employees will accrue for that type of vacation per ‘counted hour that accrues vacation’.
For example, to meet Australian minimum leave entitlements as covered by the National Employment Standards (NES) for permanent employees, the rates are commonly defaulted to:
[bs_row class=”row”]
[bs_col class=”col-sm-4″]Annual vacation[/bs_col]
[bs_col class=”col-sm-4″]Long service vacation[/bs_col]
[bs_col class=”col-sm-4″]Personal vacation[/bs_col]
[/bs_row]
[bs_row class=”row”]
[bs_col class=”col-sm-4″]0.0769230769[/bs_col]
[bs_col class=”col-sm-4″]0.0166666660[/bs_col]
[bs_col class=”col-sm-4″]0.0384615386[/bs_col]
[/bs_row]
As every ‘rule’ or condition combination can be set to either accrue vacation or not, for this to correctly calculate you will need to be able to identify the conditions, condition combinations and/or earning rates that should accrue vacation.
Where to now?
Ento’s Award Interpreter Fact Sheet & Pricing Guide