You can create Chris21 Leave Balance reports to display employee leave accruals and entitlements. When a leave type is set up to accrue, you can use the Balances (LAC) form to view current leave balances or recalculate the balances by entering a different date.

There will be a number of accruing leave types set up in your Chris21 database. These were configured when your Chris21 system was first implemented. Common accruing leave types include Annual Leave, Sick Leave and Long Service Leave, although there may be others depending on your organisation’s requirements.

Accruing leave types are configured on the Accrual Rules (LVR) form in Chris21. An LVR record must be created for any leave type that you want to accrue. The Accrual Rules form lets you define how much leave to accrue and how that accrual displays on your leave Balances (LAC) form. See my blog Chris21 Leave Accruals Configuration for more information about this.

When you query an employee’s leave balances in Chris21 you will see the Current Entitlement and Current Accrual displayed in days and hours. If you change the As At Date on the Leave Balances (LAC) form and click the Query Balances button you may notice the leave balances change. The new values that are displayed are calculated according to the configuration of your Accrual Rules (LVR) form.

The main drawback of using the LAC form to query leave balances in Chris21 is that you can only display the balances of one employee at a time. While this is fine in many circumstances, there will be times when you want to extract the leave balances for a group of employees or even for all of the employees in your database.

How to extract leave balances in Chris21 for multiple employees

When you want to extract the leave balances for multiple employees you can use the Report Designer to create leave balance reports. As with any other report you can include any of the fields that appear on the leave Balances (LAC) form in your report.

When creating Chris21 leave balance reports, a useful tip is to make sure that you include the As At Date field in your report. This is important because leave balances can change on a daily basis and the As At Date will highlight the date when the balances were current. In other words, if someone is reviewing the report two weeks after it was produced they should be aware that the balances will be slightly out of date.

It’s worth noting that the As At Date will default to today’s date so your report will show leave balances current as at the date the report is run. If you want to produce a report that shows leave balances as at a different date, you can use the Update Leave (LVU) process.

The effect of the Update Leave (LVU) process on your Chris21 leave balance reports

The Update Leave process is used by payroll to determine leave balances as at a given date rather than today’s date. See my blog Chris21 Leave Balances Don’t Look Right? Try This Tip for more information about the Update Leave process.

One of the main advantages of the Leave Update (LVU) process is that it will update the leave of a group of employees and report the balances that will be current at that date. In other words, it is just the same as you entering a new date in the As At Date on LAC except it will recalculate the balances for multiple employees rather than just one employee. When you run your report, the As At Date will be the same as the date you set on the Update Leave process.

Below is a screenshot of the Update Leave (LVU) form in Chris21:

After running this Update Leave process you can then run your leave balance reports to show projected leave balances as at 30 June 2016. The leave balances that are generated by the Update Leave process are stored on the EMLAC.DAT file. There are many cases where this type of report could be useful. For instance, a manager may want to know what the leave balances of his or her staff will be at a given time in the future, perhaps at the end of the financial year.

One final tip. Once you have run your Chris21 leave balance reports it is good practice to re-run the LVU process to set the date back to today’s date. This effectively refreshes the EMLAC.DAT file so that balances as at today are stored.  It’s important to do this because running LVU is a system update which effects all users of Chris21. This is another reason why it’s a good idea to have the As At Date as a field on your report. It’s a visual check that you are reporting over the correct date.