‘Awards’ or ‘Award configurations’ are sets of rules followed to cost staff shifts. They can also be used to alert or warn about potential compliance issues around rostering and pay.
Awards setup
The Ento awards 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 awards controls and how it works, for any changes to the awards we recommend getting in touch with our Support team.
To view your awards settings, go to Payroll & Leave > Awards 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 Award 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 staff 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.
Award 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 Awards 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 staff 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 staff who do not work overtime.
Additional alerts
Additional alerts are checks that are run as you roster. They perform like conditions without any attached loading, and can highlight rostering instances that will have higher cost, such as overtime, or warn to assist with award 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 rostering 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 awards that utilise this feature. Here is where the types of hours that can be converted to TOIL are specified, whether staff are required to pre-approve TOIL, etc. Affected hours can then be converted to TOIL from Time & Attendance > Review Timesheets, adding to the staff’s TOIL balance, which can be used when they apply for TOIL Leave.
Leave types
Each leave type can be turned on or off for each award, and can be set for staff to be able to request each leave type themselves, or can be set so a manager would submit that type of request for them.
In general, if the award is for casual staff, unless you are using some unpaid leave types to assist with monitoring casual staff calling in sick etc, all leave types for casuals are set to ‘Not Available’.
Leave types, whether they are linked to a leave balance, and if they should skip public holidays, is managed Payroll & Leave > Leave types.
Leave accrual rates
Leave accrual rates are the amount of hours staff will accrue for that type of leave per ‘counted hour that accrues leave’.
For example, to meet Australian minimum leave entitlements as covered by the National Employment Standards (NES) for permanent staff, the rates are commonly defaulted to:
Where to now?
Ento’s Award Interpreter Fact Sheet & Pricing Guide