Setting up leave and absence plans – 6 – running accruals

Accruals are boring and surely nobody’s favourite subject, but they have to be done.

You have to tell Talent to go away and run the code that calculates what leave people are entitled to. You do this from the Leave and absence workspace, under Links > Manage leave > Accrue leave and absence plans. You can also do it directly from the worker form if you don’t want to run the whole thing.

Accruals are dead simple, you just select whether you want to run it from today’s date, or a custom date. Both might apply – in my example I want to accrue as of the first day of my next leave year – so I get all accrual transactions in the run up to the switchover. You can set accruals to run in the background, in a batch job, and automate their recurrence. I’m not going to teach you how to do that – there’s plenty of stuff about batch jobs on MS Docs – give it a google.

When you run accruals you need to know the sequencing of accrual transactions. There are some changes expected in this area but as of right now, the accrual transaction happens before the carryover transaction when you run accruals.

Scenario:

  • I have 8 days of leave remaining in the current leave year
  • I’m due to accrue 26 days for next year
  • I’m only allow to carry over 5 days

What you would expect to happen:

  • Accruals are run
  • Carryover adjustment is made (-3 days on my balance to bring 8 days down to 5)
  • Accrual award is made (+26 days for the new year)
  • New balance = 31 days

What actually happens:

  • Accruals are run
  • Accrual award is made (+26 days for the new year – my balance is now 8 + 26 = 34)
  • Carryover adjustment is made (-29 days to bring 34 days down to 5)
  • New balance = 5 days

Workaround – make your carry over amount on each plan the full accrual amount plus maximum carryover (until this gets resolved, which should be in the fairly near future).

You’ve accrued. Everyone’s got some balance. They’re booking leave left right and centre. Go and make a cuppa and then get on with payroll.

9 thoughts on “Setting up leave and absence plans – 6 – running accruals”

  1. ‘Workaround – make your carry over amount on each plan the full accrual amount plus maximum carryover (until this gets resolved, which should be in the fairly near future).’

    Hi Tom,

    I’ve read this blog multiple times now and it’s been an amazing help, thank you! Just in relation to the point above, it seems there has been an update..

    On the Leave Plan page, there is a field called ‘Accrual Award Date’. If this is set to ‘Accrual Period Start Date’ instead of the end date, the accrual will be added after the carry amount is calculated.

    Reply
    • Oh awesome – thanks for the heads up Christy, I’ll check that out. Glad to hear the blog’s been useful for someone other than me 🙂

      Reply
  2. Thanks for posting this braindump on this topic. The same way as Christy, I made it one of my main sources for real world experiences with Talent. I really appreciate your effort and time with this.

    Reply
    • Thanks Xavier – it’s always nice to hear from people who’ve found it useful, and I really appreciate you taking the time to comment.

      Reply
  3. Hi Tom, we’re setting up our annual accruals to run for the first time over the weekend, but once we’ve set the future date up and hit ok, the system seems to start processing which is exactly what we don’t want it to do until everyone’s off for the weekend. Do you have any insight on this? Are we just seeing the system setting itself up for a run at the weekend?

    Reply
    • Hey Tom – really sorry for the delayed response to this, I’ve only just checked in with the blog and seen your comment. Did you get it sorted in the end?

      Reply
  4. Hi Tom,

    I am having an issue with my accrual. I did set up the “Accrue and Leave absence” the right way (I would like to believe) but the issue is it does not accrue practically. When you are on the balance page and click on the number of days that you have (checking the accrual history), it shows that it did accrue at the end of the month as we did set in the parameters.

    Could you please help?

    Reply
  5. Hi Tom,

    I could really use your help now. Your blog is amazing.
    We have set up the Accrue leave and absence plan but it seems not to work properly.

    The leave are not accruing but at the back it says that it accrues. The batch job seems running fine but numbers are just not changing.

    Reply
    • Hi Sandra – can you post a few more details? How is your leave plan set up? How do you know accruals are running? What numbers are you expecting to see, and what numbers are you actually seeing? With a bit more info I can suggest places to look to solve the problem. Cheers!

      Reply

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