Creating policies allows Centreli to automatically calculate the paid time off balances for each employee. Depending on your specific needs you may need to define all or part of the available options during the creation of policies. Each section below describes how to define that specific portion of the policies describes how it impacts employee balance calculations. If you have hourly employees that earn PTO based on the actual hours worked see Creating policies for hourly employees.



To create a policy follow these directions.


Note: You must be an account administrator.


  1. From the Home screen click the Paid Time Off Policies app icon.
  2. Click the Create New Policy button on the top right of the screen.
  3. Complete the sentence to fit the policy needs you have for the selected employee.
  4. Click the Create Policy button to finish.


Below are some helpful descriptions for certain policy options:


Policy Type
Select the paid time off type that you want to create the policy for (i.e., Vacation, Sick).

Note: You can create your own custom types under the settings option from the home page.


Hours
Enter the total amount of hours that this employee will earn in total for the entire year. For example, if your policy is that the employee earns 80 hours for the year enter 80.


Maximum Hours

This value is optional, and it controls the maximum number of hours that an employee can "bank" or hold as a balance at any point in time. When a value is entered the system will not allow the employee to earn any additional hours beyond the amount entered. Essentially any hours that exceed this amount are forfeited or lost. This is necessary for companies that do not allow their employees to continue to bank time year after year when they do not take time off. 


Earning Hours

Depending on your needs, an employee can either earn all of their hours immediately at the beginning of the year. On a specific month and day of the year, or on each pay period. If you select each pay period you will specify the pay interval after.


Expiration

This option controls whether or not the balance of time off your employee has will be reset at a specific point in time. A common policy for many companies is to have sick time hours expire at the end of the year since the unused balance does not carry over to the next year if unused. 


Policy Start Date
This date is very important as Centreli uses this date to determine when to start calculating when an employee begins to earn hours. If you are transferring your balances from another system or spreadsheet enter the date that your balances are through. So for example if you are transferring from another system and your employee has a balance of 10 hours through 12/31/2012 enter 01/01/2013 as the policy start date so that Centreli will start calculating earned hours from the date of your employees balance.

Beginning Balance
This value is optional. Only use this when your employee(s) have balances from another system that you were using to track hours. If you specify an amount you need to be aware that the policy start date entered is the day after your employee's balance is through. (See Policy Start Date above). If your employee does not have a balance do not enter a value.