Vacation Group Levels & Advancement

Vacation Groups control what percentage of an employee’s wages will earn vacation earnings. Vacation Groups can also be setup so that the rate is promoted to another rate after a given amount of service time has been accrued by an employee. This could be used to award employees who have worked for many years for example.

Outcomes

This guide will discuss how the vacation rate promotions work, and describe how a Vacation Group could be setup to automatically increase the vacation rate by .5% every year for 3 years.

Additionally, the use of Vacation Group promotions will be discussed, where the Vacation Group assigned to an employee will automatically change to another Vacation Group.

Vacation Group

First a new Vacation Group must be created, where the different vacation rates will be setup alongside the criteria for earning those rates.

Open Canadian Payroll > Employer Payroll Tables > Vacation Groups.
Add a new Vacation Group by pressing Insert at the bottom of the window.
Setup the Vacation Group. (see Vacation Groups).

Vacation Groups

1	Enter the 2-digit Vacation Group number, and a longer Description of the Vacation Group.
2	Enter the Benefit Code where the vacation will be accrued.

Benefit Code:

The Benefit Code must be setup using the Accrued Vacation Type in order to be selected for the Vacation Group.

Details

Vacation Groups can hold up to four different vacation rates that will apply depending on the amount of service time that an employee has accrued. These rates and the corresponding service time criteria are setup from the Details on the Vacation Group.

Service time, Hours:

Service time can be reviewed on the Employee Profile from the Totals tab.

1	Accumulated service hours will be read by the Vacation Groups that have a Service Basis of "Hours".

Service time, Months:

Vacation Date can be reviewed on the Employee Profile from the Dates tab.

1	The difference in whole months between this date and the Pay Period End Date will be read by the Vacation Groups that have a Service Basis of "Months". Note that it does not have to match other dates, though it does default to whatever date is originally entered as the Initial Hire Date.

How to setup a Vacation Code that will increase the vacation rate by 0.5% percent every 12 months (each year) for 3 years, will be used as an example here.

1	Service time can be measured in `Hours`, `Months`, or by `Formula` depending on the value of `Service Basis`.
2	The maximum service time before the nextrate will apply is entered here for each of the vacation rates required. In this example the `4.0%` rate will apply for the first `12 months` for example. The last vacation rate used `999 months` to indicate that the last rate (`5.5%`) should be used after 3 years.
3	The actual vacation rate percentages are entered here.

Vacation Group Promotion

In addition to promoting the vacation rate, the Vacation Group can also promote to another Vacation Group after the last service time requirement has been reached.

Vacation Group promotion could be used if more than 4 levels of vacation rate are needed, or to promote employees to a special vacation group after a number of years of service.

Tip:

The advantage of using a Vacation Group promotion over a vacation rate promotion is that it allows different Benefit Codes to be used for each Vacation Group.

The previous example will be slightly modified so that after 4 years of service time has been accrued by an employee, they will be promoted to the Executive Vacation Group.

1	Update the service time criteria for the final vacation rate to `48 months` (`4 years`). After the four years of service time has been reached the Vacation Group will automatically change to the `Next Group`.
2	Select the Vacation Group to promote to.

An employee assigned to this Vacation Group will earn 4.0% vacation in the first year, 4.5 in the second, 5.0% in the third, and 5.5% in the fourth year. However after four years of service time has been accrued they will be promoted to the Executive Vacation Group and corresponding vacation rate.