Public Holidays

How do Public Holidays Work

Up to date State and Federal public holidays are provided in each business, automatically (public holidays legislated by state governments, these we do not include by default, however they are easily added).  They are utilised in the following ways:

• Public holidays excluded when estimating amount of leave required for leave applications (public holidays are determined based upon the employee's default location)
• Pay conditions may be set up to automatically pay employees at different rates for public holidays

Please note that unless pay condition rules are set up (available only on the Advanced Plan), public holidays are not automatically applied during a pay run. 

A short video on this setup can be found here.

Public holidays won't impact permanent employees as their earnings do not change. They will still be paid even though they don't work that day and there will be no reference to the Public Holiday in the pay run.

Set up requirements for public holidays

For public holidays to function, the following steps must be taken:

• Configure the state for your locations (if necessary)
• (optional) set up pay conditions to automatically apply public holiday rates

Checklist relating to public holidays

• Assign each location a state in payroll
• Manually add public holidays for custom holidays not automatically included such as local/regional and company authorised (e.g. picnic days) public holidays, and assign each location a state. 

Manually Adding Public Holidays

The settings for Public Holidays can be accessed and updated by clicking on the 'Payroll settings' >  'Public holidays' option.

>This screen allows you to:

• Manually add public holidays - click on required date on the calendar to add public holiday - please check for all government and regional public holidays not listed and add them in manually if required, make sure a state is assigned to this location on the Locations page, under the pay run settings heading on the payroll settings tab.
  • If you want a public holiday to apply to certain locations only you need to ensure that you don't select the state the location/s are in (as this will result in the holiday being applied to all locations in that state)

System Public Holidays 

You can disable a system public holiday by selecting the holiday and choosing the disable option. This will leave the holiday in your calendar but there will be a line through the name;

To re enable this holiday simply select it again and select to restore the system public holiday. 

Configuring the State on Locations

All public holidays operate at either the state level or at the specific location level. It is important to set up the state information on locations in the system.

Please note that if the state is configured on a higher-level location, it will be used for any nested locations (unless they also specify a state).

To configure the state for locations:

• Go into payroll settings, then to the 'Locations' menu
• Find the required location and click on the name
• Select the state that the location is associated with
• click Save

Setting up Public Holiday Pay Conditions

This section describes how to set up a basic rule for public holidays. For more information about pay conditions, refer to this article.

This section assumes that an appropriate Public Holiday pay category has been set up and that the public holiday rates have been configured for the employees.

To add a public holiday rule to your existing rule set:

• click 'Add Rule' on the right hand side of the page
• Give your rule a name, e.g: 'Public Holidays'
• in the 'WHEN' section, choose 'Public Holiday'
• in the 'THEN' section, choose 'Apply Pay Category' and then select an appropriate 'Public Holiday' pay category
• click 'Save'
  
  
  
  

Be sure to activate the rule set and associate the rule set with the appropriate employees.

There are different scenarios in which you may want to automate for your Public Holidays, so please see the below article for this:

How to Automate Public Holiday Pay with Rule Sets

If you have any feedback or questions please contact us via support@yourpayroll.com.au