Updating the leave opening balance date and values in the employee profile is often overlooked when adding take-on employees.

Leave is calculated based on days and not on a monthly period. Legislation affords employee leave based on days worked and not calendar months. Other software uses the average days per month (365 ÷ 12) and this has resulted in the employer or employee being short-changed consistently. The variance from one month to the next is minimal, but it makes sense if you follow the for every number of days worked rule as determined by law. This can be overridden with the monthly override field in leave types under settings and if this has a value, the employee override default allowance will also be considered monthly rather than cycle length.

To automatically add remuneration for leave on termination may cause some employers to be out of pocket because not all leave should always be paid out as annual leave expires after 18 months according to South African labour law and some employers, although they would allow the employee to still take it after 18 months, do not pay it out on termination. Thus, we allow editing of payslips after termination but before requesting the EMP201 report. The termination popup however does show values of any leave and loan balances to help make the process smoother.

Our defaults for annual leave don't expire the leave to provision for business with mandatory annual shutdowns. You can change that to 18 months should you want to in line with the Basic Conditions of Employment and during the next pay run, the leave will expire.

After you created the first payslip for the relevant employee, the leave opening balance date cannot be changed. This is because leave has already been calculated from the leave opening balance date to the end date of the new payslip. This is also why we give notices on the new employee popups regarding leave opening balances.

Leave cycles ALWAYS start from the employee's appointment date. Leave cycles starting before the leave opening balance date should generate zero earnings. Other factors include the fields in the leave type settings: Default allowance, Cycle length, Cycle expiry, Qualification, Pro rata before cycle qualification, Pro rata after cycle qualification, and Monthly override.

There are a few rules applicable to setting up leave types: Cycle qualification can't be more than the cycle length, Cycle length must be more than zero, If cycle qualification is less than cycle length, pro rata after cycle qualification will be No, and If pro rata after qualification, then also pro rata before qualification. You must also note these rules aren't just applicable to the number fields, but also the length dropdowns which are in days, months, or years. 2 months will be regarded as shorter than 1 year and may reject some settings you modified to comply with the rules.