Leave and absence is one area where Microsoft are spending a lot of effort at the moment. Every time I go back to it to complete the setup for a client it looks a bit different than it did the time before. New fields get added, forms change slightly, and it can do more than it did last time. To save me time relearning everything each time I thought I’d spend a few minutes today documenting how it works.
This series of posts is going to be about how I would set up leave plans to suit most of the companies I’ve ever worked for. That is:
- The leave year is a fixed period shared by a group of workers (April to March, say, or January to December)
- An award of leave is made to each worker at the start of the leave year, in the assumption that they will work the full leave year (with appropriate adjustments made to salary at the point of departure, should they resign mid-year)
- If a worker begins their employment mid-year, they receive a leave grant which is pro-rated to allow for the fact that they are only working part of the leave year. For example – if my leave year runs January to December, and I normally award 26 days, if a worker starts on 1 July they will receive a leave grant of 13 days, reflecting the fact that they are only working half the year.
Before I do anything else, I need to choose the unit for booking leave in the current legal entity. There are several ‘Ideas’ posted asking Microsoft to change this, but right now units are set at the LE level. You can choose hours or days, and if you choose days, you can select if half day units are acceptable. Once you’ve set this, created plans, and enrolled workers, it can’t be changed – so make this decision early or you’ll have to live with the consequences. You set this value in Human resources parameters > Leave and absence.
The next thing I need to do is set up my leave types.
Update 19 November 2019 – while you’re in that parameters page, you might want to have a look at the ‘Balance calculation’ setting, which I looked at in more detail in this post from the future…