You will be aware that you have a number of accruing leave types in Chris21. The accruing leave types in your database 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 and click the Query Balances button you may notice the leave balances change. The new values that are displayed are determined by the setup on the 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 a report. 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 a report over LAC, a useful tip is to make sure that you include the As At Date field in your report. I think this is very 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someone is reviewing the report two weeks after it was produced they should be aware that the balances will be slightly out of date.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 leave balances report

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 balances report to show projected leave balances as at 30 June 2014. 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 leave balances report 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.

As always, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Or leave a comment and I will respond.

The post Reporting Over Leave Balances in Chris21 appeared first on System Logic.

What is a leave group in Chris21?

A leave group essentially holds all of the leave rules that are required for a given group of employees. Leave rules define things such as the way leave accrues and how much accrues, whether or not overtime is payable, and leave overflow rules. To view all of the available leave rules in your system go to the Administration -> Leave menu from the main menu in Chris21.

As an example, you will probably have a leave group for your casual employees. One of the leave rules in the Casual leave group will ensure that casual employees don’t accrue annual leave. This is done by excluding the Annual Leave accrual rules (LVR) record. On the other hand, full time employees will be assigned a leave group that does have and LVR record defined for annual leave. For more information about leave accrual rules see my blog Chris21 Leave Accruals Configuration.

You can have any number of leave groups. This will depend on the number of different groups of employees in your organisation. If possible, it is best to keep the number of leave groups to a minimum. This is because any future maintenance will be easier the fewer groups you have.

How do I assign leave groups to employees?

This is done using the Position (POS) form in Chris21. Every employee is assigned a Position record and one of the fields on the Position form is Leave Group. This is a mandatory field so it must be filled in. Once an employee is a assigned a leave group all leave rules associated with that group will attributed to the employee.

If an employee changes position, it may be necessary to assign a different leave group also. This will be particularly relevant if the employee is changing employment conditions, for instance from full-time to part-time. This is an important point. If a leave group should be changed but is overlooked, it could mean an employee will accrue the wrong amount of leave in future!

When will I have to change leave groups in Chris21?

As mentioned earlier, leave groups in Chris21 will very rarely have to be changed. If you do have to make changes it will usually be associated with changes to awards or enterprise bargaining agreements.

When it comes to making changes to leave groups please proceed with caution. Some changes can have a big impact on your Chris21 database. As an example, if you change the configuration settings in Accrual Rules (LVR), the result can be a recalculation of leave balances for all employees in that leave group. It’s good advice to try this in your test system and review the results to make sure you get what you expect!

The post Understanding the Concept of Leave Groups in Chris21 appeared first on System Logic.

From time to time clients will tell me their Chris21 leave balances are not reporting accurately. What shows on their reports is not what shows when they look up a leave balance on the Balances (LAC) form in Chris21. This can cause some unnecessary stress to the report author, particularly when these reports are being delivered to and closely scrutinised by managers.

If you come across this issue the answer is your Leave Update (LVU) process. The Leave Update process can be run in Chris21 at any time and its purpose is to calculate leave balances at a given date. Payroll will usually want to do this during payroll processing so that they can determine leave balances at a point in time. This is important given that some leave balances accrue on a daily basis so they become a ‘moving target’.

How does the Leave Update process work?

You will be aware that you can update Chris21 leave balances for an individual employee by going to LAC, choosing the leave type and then changing the As At Date and clicking Save. This process will recalculate the chosen leave balance for the given date. This date can be in the past or in the future. The Leave Update process essentially works the same way except that you can do it for a group of employees and multiple leave types in a single process.

A problem arises if the Leave Update process is run by Payroll and then another Chris21 user, unaware of this, runs a leave Balances (LAC) report expecting to see current leave balances. The result can be inaccurate leave balances being reported to management groups.

The best way to avoid this situation is to always include the As At Date in your leave Balances (LAC) reports. This way, if the Leave Update process has been run recently then the As At Date will reflect this. If you see an As At Date that does not match the current date then you can be sure that you need to re-run the Leave Update process to get your balances back to the current date. If you do need to re-run the Leave Update process it would be a good idea to let Payroll know!

Keep this tip in mind when running your Chris21 Leave Balances reports so that you can be sure the reports you are publishing contain the most up to date information.

The post Chris21 Leave Balances Don’t Look Right? Try This Tip appeared first on System Logic.