Common Considerations for Setting Up Statutory Absences

A few important points need to be considered before setting up statutory absences.

Effective Dates

When creating new components, ensure that you set an effective start date, which covers the time scale of the absences you need to enter, including any absence history that you might need to migrate.

Note: The effective start date of the elements cannot be earlier than the 1 April 2012 for Statutory Sick Pay, Maternity Pay, Adoption Pay and Paternity Pay, and 6 April 2015 for Shared Parental Leave Pay. It should also be ensured that any employee’s schedules are effective from at least the start date of any absences you need to record.

Seniority Date

The Statutory Absence Service Start Date field is used to record the date (different to the hire date) for calculating the period of service for entitlement and payment of UK statutory absences. The field is located on the employees work relationship record in the service dates, legal employer section of the work relationship record.

If this field is populated, any Statutory Absences for the person will have the length of service eligibility calculated using the date that has been entered. If the field is not populated, then the hire date from the employees’ employment record will be used to calculate length of service eligibility.

Absence Record Maintenance

Ensure that any absence types that you create have the appropriate absence record maintenance values populated, so that employees, managers, and administrators can update or maintain absence records appropriately.

Unit of Measure

For statutory payments to work, specify the correct unit of measure for each statutory plan, as described in subsequent sections of this document. Absence types can be in any unit of measure that is appropriate for your business needs.

For example, if your occupational plans are in hours, you will need to set up the absence type in hours to ensure that you capture absences correctly.

Payment Percentage Override

The payment of statutory absence payments is controlled by the use of certification, the payment percentage override functionality for a plan should not be used. Therefore, when setting up plans the ‘Disable payment percentage override’ field should be ticked.