Answer
If one or more of an employee's leave balances have accrued incorrectly, or have been set up incorrectly/not set up at all, they can be corrected in a number of ways.
We would recommend using our Recalculate Leave on Pays tool, which can be found in the Tools menu on the top left of Lightning Payroll.
This tool gives you the ability to retroactively apply an employee's corrected leave settings to old pays. The tool applies the current leave settings to each pay in the time period selected, taking into account leave taken in the pays when adjusting the balances. For this tool to work correctly, it's essential that you review and/or correct employees' leave settings under Employees >> Leave >> Leave Settings prior to using the tool.
This tool allows you to recalculate leave for an employee and automatically set the new balances.
In the following example, David Cattermole's leave has not been calculating correctly since the beginning of January.
As leave is calculated on a per pay basis, the first thing we will do when using the tool is to select the date range for the pays we wish to recalculate leave on. In this case, we have chosen the 1st of January up until the 6th of February (the end date of the most recently completed pay run).
Once we've set the dates, we can proceed to the next screen and select David from the list as we wish to recalculate his leave.
The next screen will show us the pays for David within the date range we set. We wish to recalculate leave on all the pays for the entire date range so we will select all (you will typically want to select all pays in most scenarios).
The next window will ask us to select the leave type we wish to recalculate for David. In this example, we want to recalculate his holiday, sick and long service leave as we think they all may be incorrect for the period.
The final page will display the leave recalculations for David. As you can see in the green square, the tool is displaying David's current holiday accrual in the left column and the recalculated accrual in green in the right column.
The blue underline shows that for the pay ending the 6th of February, David's holiday accrual was correct as it matches the recalculated accrual.
You can generate a printable report by clicking the Print/Preview button on the bottom left. To apply the recalculated amounts, simple click the Finish button on the bottom right.
Alternative methods for adjusting leave balances
Leave balances as at the most recent completed pay can be amended under Employees >> Leave >> Leave Entitlement Adjustments. If you know the correct balance already, simply overwrite the incorrect balance with the correct one.
If the total you wish to enter is from another period of time than the most recent completed pay, you can go to the pay run for that period, open Pays >> Edit Pay, and click the pencil button next to the balance under Leave balances. This lets you adjust the balance from whichever period you like.
If you don't know the total and need to recalculate, you can use Lightning Payroll's leave calculators, seen to the right-hand side of the Leave Entitlement Adjustments screen. Alternatively, you can also utilise Fairwork's online leave calculator here.
