It is good practice to check that the bereavement leave is paid at the expected rate, especially for an employee on '8% of Gross Earnings (temp and irregular scenario) leave setting.
Updated: August 2023
Bereavement leave is not an accruing leave type and there is no maximum amount of bereavement leave an employee can take. When you enter bereavement leave in a timesheet you can check the value of what it is paid at by clicking in the entry field of the timesheet. This is especially important for employees on the '8% of Gross Earnings' leave setting (such as casuals and fixed-term employees) as they do not have a set day size the system uses for calculating bereavement leave. The system will take any amount entered for bereavement leave as indicating a full day of work, unless you toggle the settings in the Costing Screen as shown below.
When making changes to the costing screen for one entry, check the other entries of the same type to update each. Costing screen changes are unique to individual entries and do not carry over automatically to all entries on the timesheet.
Follow this link for a quick reminder of how to add bereavement leave to your fixed-term employee's timesheet.
- In your saved timesheet (with green boxes), left-click in the bereavement leave hours entry field to access that entry's calculation data. Scroll down to find the costing screen information below the timesheet.
- This line shows the value of the bereavement leave to be paid for this entry. The system doesn't look at the number you enter into the bereavement leave day box. It recognises that there is an entry in one box for the bereavement leave field of the timesheet, then automatically calculates the average daily rate. This average daily rate is paid for a full day of work no matter the amount of hours you entered into the timesheet.
- In this example, this line shows that for the entry clicked (Bereavement on Tuesday 11 July) a total of $ 131.43 will be paid regardless of the hours entered in the timesheet. Meaning: this entry is worth $ 131.43 to the employee, which is their average daily rate.
- The system takes the number of hours you entered into the timesheet for leave (step 1) as the ordinary hours the employee would have worked for this particular day, as the system doesn't refer to the 'default entries for standard pay row' set in the Employee Profile for the '8% of Gross' leave setting.
- In this example, the 5 hours entered into the timesheet are taken as 5 ordinary hours for Tuesday 11 July.
- If you wish to pay the employee their hourly rate (Step 6), and not their average daily pay (default) you need to ensure that this number is accurate as the number of hours the employee would have worked on this day. If you change the number of hours in the timesheet (and save), this number will update. You can also manually change the number here in this box.
- The system will automatically default to paying bereavement leave at the average daily pay rate for employees on the '8% of Gross' leave setting. This shows you the numbers used for calculating the average daily rate.
- If you are running a first pay, these fields will be empty as the pay history has not been uploaded in the system yet. You should manually enter the correct numbers here to ensure that the average daily pay is calculated correctly, or the value of the day will be paid at $0.
- This is the default calculation for an employee on the '8% of Gross' leave setting. Keep this setting toggled on to pay your fixed-term employee at the average daily rate for bereavement leave.
- If you want to pay your employee their hourly rate, or ordinary rate, you should switch to this setting. Note that the system will pay the employee based on the hours entered in the timesheet box, not the hours set in the Employee Profile.
- You will note that bereavement leave does not impact employee leave balances, so this column should be empty.
Paying part day as bereavement leave:
There are two important places you need to manually change to ensure your fixed-term employee is paid correctly for a part day of bereavement leave.
This example shows what the Costing screen will look like after all the changes have been made:
- In your saved timesheet (with green boxes), left-click in the bereavement leave hours entry field to access that entry's calculation data. Scroll down to find the cost tracking information below the timesheet.
- This line shows the value of bereavement leave to be paid for this entry. Originally this amount will be the amount for a full day of bereavement leave (i.e. $131.43 as in the example above). By default, the system pays at the average daily rate. You will manually toggle the system to pay for the hours on the timesheet in Step 4, so this number will update. Check back on this number after following the steps in this guide.
- This example shows what the pay will be after all the changes have been made. The line shows that for the entry clicked (Bereavement on Thursday 13 July) the total pay has dropped from $ 131.43 to $ 78 based on the hourly rate per hours entered in the timesheet. Meaning: this entry is worth $ 78 to the employee, which is paid at their hourly rate.
- Change this number to reflect the total amount of hours the employee would have worked on this day. (Standard pay hours + bereavement leave hours).
- Originally, this number will be the hours entered in the bereavement leave timesheet entry only. You have to update this number to reflect all the hours for this day. In this example, the original entry was 3. I manually changed that to 5 hours.
- After toggling on this setting, the cost tracking pay amount will update to the new amount. (Step 1, shown as per the example)Toggle on this setting to pay at the ordinary rate. This will pay your employee their hourly rate based on the hours entered in the timesheet.
- Remember to Update and Save the timesheet after making these changes.
If you do not make these changes manually, the system will overpay the employee for this day e.g. in this timesheet example, the system will pay the standard pay entry of 2 hours plus a full day's pay (ADP) for the bereavement leave entry
($ 52 + $ 131.43 = $ 183.43 for Thursday's timesheet entries).