Blog

April 30, 2023

Tech Tip: Setting Up Holidays In TimeClock Plus

tcp-tech-tip-post

Written by: William Felts, Tier 2 Support Technician

Everybody loves a holiday, especially a PAID holiday! Here’s how to set up holidays in TimeClock Plus to ensure employees are paid properly and on time.

Let’s start with the basics…the Holidays feature in TimeClock Plus allows you to define holidays for your organization. Holidays can be set up as one time or recurring and can represent time off or other days notable within your company for payroll purposes.

Holidays that occur on different dates each year (such as Election Day or Thanksgiving in the United States) can be created as well, as long as when they occur is consistent (such as the fourth Thursday in November).

Moveable feast dates (such as Easter) or holidays based on non-Gregorian calendars (such as the beginning of Hanukkah or Ramadan) must be entered manually, typically at the beginning of each year.

Creating a Holiday

To create a Holiday in TCP Manager you will navigate to Company > Holidays > hit the +Add button in the top right to start creating a new Holiday.

A smaller widow will open to allow you to add a Holiday.

Description: This will be name/title of the Holiday that shows in the software.

Note: If the Holiday is not a “Recurring Holiday” that occurs yearly on the same date, then we recommend you include the year the Holiday is taking place in the description. This will help prevent any confusion in the future when looking at your employees Holidays.

Active box: Determines whether the Holiday is currently active or not. If the Holiday is not “Active” it will not post to your employee’s hours at the scheduled time.

Calculate qualifying hours worked on this date as holiday hours: If the hours worked on this date will count as holiday hours, check Calculate qualifying hours worked on this date as holiday hours. This will ensure that the holiday receives any special premiums as set up on the employee level. (Found via Employee > Employee Profile > Overtime tab > Advanced branch)

Restrict time off requests: Allows you to prevent an employee from entering a time off request on this Holiday. For example, if on this Holiday your employees get the day off, you would not want them to enter a time off request that pulls from their accruals (PTO/Vacation hours).

Holiday Editor/Processing Settings

As you’re setting up holiday in TimeClock Plus, you have the following options to determine if the holiday is processed and how many hours are processed.

Include in holiday processing: If the system needs to automatically add holiday time to the employee for this day, place a check next to Include in holiday processing.

Skip processing if a segment already exists: This will prevent the software from posting the Holiday hours to the employee’s hours if the employee already has a time segment for the day.

Use employee work week settings: The holiday will post hours depending on the employee’s “Work Week Settings.” (Found via Employee > Employee Profile > select an employee > Hours tab > Work Week Settings)

In the above example, employee 101 – Anne Teak – would have the Holiday post for 8 hours that day if the “Use employee work week settings” setting was enabled for the Holiday.

Use specified hours: This tells the software how many hours to post for the employee for the Holiday.

Job code to add hours: This setting allows you to choose the Job code that the Holiday will post as. Typically, we recommend you use “Holiday” job code.

Using the “Default” option will have the Holiday post as the employee’s default job code. The employee’s default job code would be located on the employee profile via Employee > Employee profile > Select the employee > Jobs tab > Default branch

In this example, if the Holiday was selected to post as the “Default” job code then employee 101- Anne Teak – would not have a Holiday post as they do not have a default job code assigned.

Note: Using a default Job code could cause some issues with your employees Overtime and Accruals if that default job code is enabled to count/earn Overtime or post hours towards the employee’s accruals.

Note: If the job code selected for the Holiday is not assigned to the employee’s profile then the Holiday will not be posted for that employee.

Shift start time: Allows you to specify when that Holiday segment will start.

Work Filter: If employees who worked a certain number of hours are the only ones eligible for receiving time for a holiday, you can use the Work Filter to establish the parameters. For instance, if an employee misses work the day before or after the holiday, then they could be made ineligible for receiving holiday time by specifying how many hours and days before and/or after the holiday they would need to work in order to qualify.

Recurring Options

Single Date: If the holiday is a one-time occurrence, select Single date and enter in the date. As mentioned above we recommend including the year the Holiday takes place in the description if the Holiday is not a recurring Holiday. We recommend you create all your single occurrence Holidays at the beginning of each year and assign them to your employees/employee roles.

Holiday Hours Processing/Automating your Holiday

If you have created holidays that will need to be automatically added to employees’ time, then you will need to set up when this processes in TimeClock Plus.

Click the Holiday Hours Processing button at the top of Holidays. This will open a Holiday Hours Processing window, where you can enable the processing by checking Active, then Add new holiday processing times via the Task Scheduling Wizard.

Hit the +Add button to create a new Holiday Processing Schedule.

For Holiday processing, we recommend you create a schedule to fire Daily at an early morning time. This is telling the software when to check if a Holiday has occurred and if one has occurred to then post those hours to the employee’s individual hours (if set up to be included in holiday processing).

Note: A Holiday will only post to employee’s hours the day after the Holiday has taken place at this scheduled time.

Assigning a Holiday to an Employee

Typically, users assign holidays company-wide or to employee roles via the Global Modification feature. Use employee profiles to assign holidays if they only apply to one employee or a small number of employees spread across several roles.

Examples: Religious Holidays, National Holidays

Navigate to Employee > Employee Profiles > select the employee from the list on the left you would like to assign the Holiday to > Leave tab > Holiday branch > +Assign > select the Holiday from the list you would like to assign to this employee > Assign > Save

This Labor Day Holiday is now assigned to this employee.

Hopefully, this Tech Tip provides the helpful instructions you need for setting up and processing holidays in TimeClock Plus, but if you need additional help, our Customer Support team is just a quick call away. Did you know 90% of our calls are answers in 60 seconds or less? Call us: 325-223-9300.