1. Administering Absences for the United Kingdom
  2. Support for Alabaster Ruling

Support for Alabaster Ruling

The Alabaster ruling specifies the norms related to any pay rise awarded during the maternity leave.

The Alabaster ruling specifies that any pay rise awarded between the beginning of the period and the end of the maternity leave must be included in the elements of pay by calculating the amount of Statutory Maternity Pay. This requirement is not limited to cases where the pay rise is backdated to the period covered by the relevant period.

The ‘relevant period’ is the period between:
  • Date 1 the last normal payday on, or before the Saturday of the Qualifying Week (QW), this is the 15th week before the week baby due. This payday will be Date 1 and is the end of the ‘relevant period’.
  • Date 2 the last normal pay day falling not less than 8 weeks before the payday at Date 1. Date 2 will be the day after this payday and is the start of the ‘relevant period’.

Earnings include all payments on, or after, Date 2, up to and including those paid on Date 1.

The pay rise will affect the amount paid to the employee during the first 6 weeks of Statutory Maternity Pay, known as the enhanced pay period. This would mean that the person would be entitled to extra money. It could also be the case that a person might have not qualified for Statutory Maternity Pay but now does due to the increased pay.

Make an Adjustment for an Employee

The case record for the Statutory Maternity absence contains a two FlexFields. (Alabaster Adjustment Amount and Alabaster Adjustment Percentage) The user is required to enter in a value for one of the fields. This will then be used to re calculate the Statutory Maternity Pay for the employee. If both fields are populated, the amount value will be used.

  1. Navigate to the employee’s maternity absence case record and populate the relevant Alabaster field with the value required.
  2. Create a retro event for the Payroll Relationship with the Process Date as of Absence Start Date. Status = 'Awaiting Processing' and 'Event Report Type = 'Retroactive Notification'.
Note: The event will be automatically created if the entitlement status changed from 'absence being paid' to 'absence being unpaid' or vice versa due to Alabaster Adjustment.

If the absence has already been paid with the amount before the uplift was added, it will be reprocessed. Also, the difference would get created as retro entries whenever the retro is processed. The difference will be paid in the subsequent payroll run.