Overview
This guide will give you an understanding of entitlements, their possible different types and how to set them up.
What is an entitlement?
Entitlements can be associated to absence types, so when an individual places a request, and it is authorised, this will deduct or increment the entitlement balance. For example, the employee may have 25 days holiday, 5 days of paid sick leave and 2 discretionary days leave.
An entitlement is a balance which is provided to individuals, normally at the start of each calendar year or employment start date.
Entitlements can be created to give a full balance each year or as an accrual using policies. For example, the employee may carry over (accrue) 5 additional days holiday from one year to the next.
Differences of entitlements
Within edays you have two types of entitlements which provide flexibility:
- Pots
- Elements
The easiest way to explain this would be to think of a recipe. You need all the ingredients (elements) which all together makes the meal (pot).
Your system is preloaded with Holiday, Sickness, TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) and Overtime /TOIL entitlement pots. Pots and elements can be enabled and disabled globally, for a subset of users via the template entitlement tab and on a user level.
Pot setting types
The record type allows you to specify which screen on the front end of the system the entitlement will be shown:
- Planned: The entitlement will appear under the planned section on the front end of the system. For example, Holiday.
- Unplanned: The entitlement will appear under the unplanned section on the front end of the system. This will only be for unplanned entitlements which increment and do not have a cap. Note: If you have an unplanned entitlement which has an entitlement, for example ‘5 Days Sickness Paid, this will need to be either hidden or set as planned.
- Overtime: The entitlement will show under the Overtime and TOIL section.
- TOIL: The entitlement will show under the Overtime and TOIL section.
- Hidden: Hides the entitlement from the front end of the system, but it does have a cap of the number of days a user can use. For example, if you have an entitlement of 60 days for Sabbatical Leave per year.
Pot setting, booking periods
The booking period determines when the entitlement balance would be accrued:
- Yearly: Is the one which will commonly be used for any entitlement, and clears and refreshes the balance each year.
- Rolling 12 months: Is something which you may want to use for Sickness (if your organisation works in this way)
- Ongoing: will already been assigned to the Overtime/TOIL entitlements and just means it’s an ongoing amount which never clears and rolls over year-on-year until the balance is used.
Pot Additional features
There are some additional settings which can be enabled on an entitlement, which are listed below:
- Visibility settings: The above allow to see information about the entitlement on the front end of the system
- Leaver proration: This setting relates to the licence types available in the system. If a user leaves your business, they can be transferred to a leaver licence. At the point that they are set as a leaver, the entitlement is prorated for the year to date.
- Calendar year that the entitlement affects. In some countries there are special entitlements which run differently to all other entitlements, for example, if your calendar year is Jan – Dec, you may have an entitlement which runs against the financial year April – (following) March.
The power of an element
New elements can be created within an entitlement pot and can be enabled or disabled globally. The common reason for disabling elements would be to enable the element at the template or at the user level. For example, an entitlement that is departmental, or location based in your business.
A sort-index can be setup to configure the priority of the entitlement element in respect of the order that the balances are used. A sort-index of zero is the highest priority, then one, two, three etc.
Base Entitlements
Also, within an entitlement element when creating a new user, you can set base entitlements. These will help streamline your process as an organisation if employees have a standard amount given to them each year.
Carry over
One thing to make sure is set up correctly is the carry-over options for the entitlement element. Entitlement can be carried over between last year, current year and next year.
You can set an entitlement to:
- Manually carry over: Manual carry over is created from requests placed by users using the form under the planned tab on the front end of the system and send a request to the manager.
- Automatically carry over: Allows remaining entitlement at the end of the year, according to the holiday year start date you set in the system, to be carried over to the carry-over limit. A maximum carry-over amount can be set. The default of 0.00 equals no maximum limit.
You can also configure a carried over entitlement to expire on a specific date.
*Please be aware if you have multiple elements, and you have set up carry over on both, then the system will carry over to the limit you have specified on each entitlement element. An example of this would be if you had an annual entitlement element and public holidays element and both had a carry-over of 5, then the combined carry-over would be 10 days rather than 5 days. To make it 5 days, you will need to specify the carry-over limit on both to 2.5 days instead.
How to create Pots and Elements?
The below knowledge base articles will instruct you on creating a new rota and applying these globally, for a sub-set of users and on the individual level:
- Entitlement Setup - Creating a new entitlement pot : edays Support Portal (e-days.com)
- Carryover Configuration - Overview : edays Support Portal (e-days.com)
A video on the configuration and example configuration can be found here: https://www.e-days.com/learning-centre-overview/9-entitlement-setup