In my previous article I talked about setting up leave accruals in Chris21 so that they are calculated according to your organisation’s requirements. The other part of the setup is determining how these balances are displayed on the Leave Balances (LAC) page and in HR21.

You have many options for configuring the display of leave accruals in Chris21. Consider the screenshot below:

With this setup the annual leave accrual will become Current Entitlement each month on the employee’s anniversary date at a rate of 1.6666667 days per month. After 12 months the employee would have accrued 20 days annual leave (less any leave taken in the period). To determine how this accrual displays in Chris21 and HR21 look at the Accrual Frequency and Accrual Units fields. In our example, Accrual Frequency is set to 1 and Accrual Units is set to D (Days). This means that the Current Accrual will be displayed on a daily basis.

Your system might be configured so that the accrual doesn’t become an entitlement until the full year has been completed. This is done as shown below:

Regardless of when accrued leave becomes entitlement, the way accrued leave is displayed will be the same as in the first example. Both will show the Current Accrual balance increasing on a daily basis. The difference being that in the first example employees will receive their entitlement at the end of each month while in the second example they will have to wait until the end of each full year of service before they receive it.

But what if you don’t want to show the Current Accrual balance on a daily basis? You may have a requirement to show the balance at the end of each week or at the end of each month. To do this you need to adjust the Accrual Frequency and Accrual Units fields. The example below shows how to set these fields to display the balance accruing on a weekly basis:

In this example the employee will receive their entitlement after each full year of service, however the Current Accrual balance will be displayed on a weekly basis. If you wanted to display accruals monthly you would set Accrual Frequency to 1 and Accrual Units to M.

For some leave types you may not want to show accruing leave at all. This might be the case with Sick leave. You can hide Current Accruals from display and only show the Current Entitlement balance. To do this, select the Suppress Accruals checkbox:

In our example of Annual leave above, the leave will still accrue in the background but the Current Accrual will always display zero on the Balances (LAC) form in Chris21 and in HR21. Employees will be able to see their Current Entitlement balance in HR21 when they have reached their Next Entitlement Date.

Remember that changes to leave Accrual Rules (LVR) records will force Chris21 to recalculate leave balances for each employee from their service start dates. For this reason you should ensure that any changes are made in your test system. This way you are free to make changes and then review the effects of these changes prior to updating your production system.