Overview

In many countries, part-time employees are entitled to a pro rata calculation of the same holiday entitlement as a full-time employee. Legally speaking, part-time staff also should not be treated less favourably than full-time staff when it also comes to Public Holidays.

Our guide below explains how to set up your system so that your edays system will automatically deduct Public Holidays on the days they are scheduled to work, and manually or automatically award a prorated balance for Public Holidays.

Public holidays do not typically appear in your entitlement summary for Full-Time employees, this is because public holiday entitlements don't need to be set up for full-time users; for example, you are awarded 8 days for public holidays and are presumed to be eligible for all 8 of them.

However, if you work part-time, you may work too many / too few public holidays for your contracted Full-Time Equivalent (FTE). For example, if an employee never works Mondays, they will find themselves with excess Public Holiday entitlement since most Public Holidays each year have taken place on the employee’s day off. 

This example assumes 8 public holidays are assigned to the rota (Public Holidays in England in 2021: 5 Mondays, 2 Fridays and 1 Tuesday)

*Rota is weekdays, Monday (M), Tuesday (T), Wednesday (W), Thursday (T), Friday (F), Saturday (S)

Part 1 - Automatically Deduct

How can I set up my edays system to automatically deduct Public Holidays for Part Timers? 

Our solution to this common problem involves a few key pieces of configuration, but the first and most important part is to allow the system to deduct holidays automatically from the days your part-timers are scheduled to work. This is based on their rota pattern. 

We recommend the following approach as a best practice, but please note this approach can vary depending on different regions and complexities.

1. Create a new Public Holiday Group that you will use specifically for your Part Timers, and set the Affected Entitlement as Holiday. This will ensure that the system automatically deducts Public Holidays from the total entitlement, depending on days expected to work.
2. You will need to update this Public Holidays Group with the standard Public Holidays for this region, which can be done manually or via the import feed. For more information on this, see our guides here. 

You now need to apply the newly created Public Holidays (Part Timers) group to the required users. We recommend two ways of doing this:

1. If you have only a few part-timers in your organisation, it can be easy to manage this individually for each part-timer (For example, below 30 users). You can go into the Admin Panel > Users > Edit > and then select the rota tab. Here you can apply the relevant Public Holiday list, and remove any existing lists.

In this case, we will remove the currently applied Public Holiday - UK list, and we will then Apply the Public Holidays (Part Timers) list. Remember to click save once done.

1. If you have numerous Part Timers and do not want to do this manually for every single user, we can use a Template to apply this to a large group of users in one click. For example, I can go into Admin > User Templates > Edit > Rota - and do the same thing here as above by applying the Public Holidays (Part Timers) group. This will then apply to all users on this template going forward. 
2. If the Public Holiday Group has been correctly applied, and the list has been populated with the relevant days, then you will see these have been automatically deducted from the user's entitlement.

If you need advice around creating new templates, please follow this guide or contact us for more help. Please note, if you have an integration with another system, this will need to be considered. 

Important Note: There are 9 Public Holidays in this particular group, but Miles is only due to be working on 8 of those days (April 7th is a non-working day for this user). Therefore, the system has automatically deducted 8 days in total, as you can see below.

Part 2 - Awarding Days

If you are deducting days from the Holiday entitlement, you will need to consider adding additional days to the overall entitlement. For Part Timers, this would typically look like:

FTE x Number of Public Holidays (e.g 0.5 x 8 = 4 days)

You can choose to manually award these days to individuals, or use our automatic proration tool. 

a) Manual Award

1. The most simple way to manage this award is to manually update a user's entitlement
2. If you have lots of part-timers to update, you can use our Import Entitlement tool to bulk update a group of users.
3. You can either add the additional days to their overall Annual Entitlement, or create a new element so it's clear these days are being awarded for Public Holidays.
   

b) Automatic Award

Public holiday entitlement configuration

For the Public Holidays part-time tool to automatically award the right amount of days for Public Holidays, you will need to make sure that you have allowed the public holidays setup globally and on each template (group of users). You should also have created an element for public holidays with the details specified below.:

1. Within the system, go to Entitlement Setup -> Elements next to a pot (usually the default holiday pot).
2. Create or edit an element that should be devoted solely to public holiday entitlement.
3. Set "Restrict element to award entitlement for public holidays" to Yes. (It is also possible to do this at Template level). This controls the award of entitlement.
4. Ensure the element has a lower sort-index than other elements in the pot, so that balance is deducted towards public holidays before other elements. (Normally, you will want this to be the lowest sort-index of all.)
5. Go to Public Holiday Setup. Ensure all sets of public holidays / custom days you are applying to deduct from this entitlement pot. This controls the deduction of entitlement.

If you are starting halfway through a year with edays the public holiday tool will need to be run for you initially and then will run on rollover thereafter. Please contact your Implementation Specialist/Project Manager to assist you. 

How the Public Holiday for part-time employees works?

Once the configuration is done, whenever new users are created, the public holiday element will award entitlement in days equal to the number of public holidays on the user's rota (multiplied by the Full-Time equivalent (FTE) - see FTE section below), even if they do not deduct. The rota is used to determine the number of hours each day that should be deducted.

Upon rollover, the next year will be populated with the allowance for the public holidays. 

Tip: Prior to rollover, it is important that the public holidays for next year and the year after are all correct.

FTE change behaviour

Within edays you have the ability within a user record to use the FTE calculator on a user’s level to calculate the new entitlement for an employee. 

The entitlement in days awarded for each public holiday is equal to the user's FTE on that day. Triggering an FTE change for the user will therefore update their entitlement award due to public holidays. (The deduction will be handled by the associated rota updates).

For example, the user's FTE changes from 1 to 0.5 on 1st July, and they have 8 public holidays in the year (Jan-Dec). 

The FTE change calculation is therefore:

• [FTE] 1 * (6/12 months) * 8 = 4 days

Plus…

• [FTE] 0.5 * (6/12 months) * 8 = 2 days

Giving the result for the full year of 6 days.

Considerations

1. Next year's public holiday entitlement can already be seen without having to wait until rollover for adjustments to be made.
2. If a new public holiday is added to the public holiday group or a new set is applied to calendars, entitlement must be manually adjusted for users.
3. It does not recalculate automatically for calendar year changes; balances should be manually adjusted after a calendar year change.
4. It does not recalculate automatically for template changes; balances should be manually adjusted if a change in template results in a change in public holiday days.
5. If a user is marked as a leaver, we don't automatically calculate their new entitlement for the fact that some of their public holiday entitlement was awarded for after the left date. However, if you also set their FTE to 0 with effective date equal to the left date, you can see entitlement calculations this way.