2. Running your Christmas pay - key things to consider
There’s a few things you should consider when running your Christmas pay:
- Make sure you’re running a regular pay cycle and don’t mix things up. Set it up in advance so you can manage different periods of leave appropriately.
- It’s important to ensure the period of pay matches what your staff member is being paid for.
- It’s common to be considering leave in advance or leave without pay during the Christmas period for your team. Make sure you and your team are aware of the different types of leave available and how they can use them. Things like Leave Without Pay can add extra steps to your payroll.
- 2021 has been a full-on year, with lots of changes and challenges for businesses throughout New Zealand. If you can, be flexible with your people and put all options on the table.
- If it all lines up, then you’re good. Hit go!
We’ll also cover off specifics around bonuses, cashing out annual leave, public holidays, and of course mondayisation. It’s all in here, so have a read and make sure you’re prepared this Christmas.
Working out how much annual leave a team member will accrue by Christmas
Everyone wants to know how much leave they’ll have by Christmas. Thankfully, we’ve got an easy formula for you and your team to use in certain scenarios. This way you can work out their leave. If you want things to be super simple, Smartly now has future leave balances built into our app if you are on Payroll Two or Three!
For team members on the same standard hours each week (e.g. 37.5 hours)
Here’s a formula to help you work out the amount the employee will accrue between now and Christmas.
The formula to keep handy
[standard work hours] x [number of weeks until Christmas] = [sub-total hours]
[sub-total hours] x 4 = [total hours]
([total hours] ÷ 260) x 5 = [hours of annual leave accrued before Christmas]
For example:
Rachel works 37.5 hours per week and is working all 4 weeks until Christmas. Currently, Rachel has 45.6 hours of annual leave. So, how do we figure out how much annual leave she’ll have available by Christmas?
Follow the steps below: