Some businesses provide contractual sick pay. A large proportion of these utilise length of service to calculate entitlement and payment. Follow these instructions for setting up Occupational Sick Pay or OSP in our payroll platform.
Set it up
- Go to Payroll settings.
- Select Leave Categories.
- Select Occupational Absence.
- In the drop down menu you can select 12/24 month rolling Sickness entitlement period.
- A rolling period looks back either 12 or 24 months to check if any sick leave has previously been taken and will calculate the remainder available to take.
- Click Save.
- Next, you need to apply the entitlement to a leave category.
- In a leave category select Leave category type.
- Select Occupational sick leave.
- Make sure ‘Automatically accrues’ and ‘based on length of service’ remain selected on the next screen.
- Select a number of service bands, up to a maximum of 10, and enter the service length based on weeks, months or years.
- Enter service length.
- Select a number of payment bands, up to a maximum of 10, and enter the percentage value of each band.
- Enter the number of days entitlement at each percentage against each service length.
- If there are employees who work more or less than 5 days per week, a separate leave category will need to be created for them with the number of days adjusted accordingly.
- In the case where multiple Leave categories for Occupational leave are created, please see the section further down regarding Leave allowance templates.
- Unpaid days at start of sick period: Similar to SSP waiting days, the ientered number of days at the start of each sickness period will not be paid.
- Days worked before recalculating: The number of days the employee has to work before OSP can become payable again. If you enter 5, after the employee has had a period of sickness then returned to work, the employee would need to work 5 days before they can be off sick and paid for the sickness.
- Pay category to use: This is automatically populated once the first Occupational sick leave category has been created. The pay component will be titled Occupational sick pay. This is a system pay category that cannot be edited.
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Accessing OSP
If you are setting up more than one occupational sick leave category or have employees who are not entitled to the occupational sick leave category you need to use leave allowance templates.
You can create a leave allowance template for each new leave type or if you have existing ones you can edit them. An employee should only be added to one occupational leave category at a time otherwise they will be entitled to all.
Employees not entitled to OSP
- For employees who are not entitled to occupational sick leave.
- Log into your payroll platform
- Click the Business Settings menu.
- Click the Payroll Settings submenu.
- Click the Leave Allowance Templates button.Here you will see a list of the existing Leave Allowance Templates and will display the number of employees that are linked to that template:
- Click the Add button. Read here for how to add a LAT.
- Create a LAT for them and do not enable any OSP leave category.
- This enables them to be paid SSP only.
Employees who are entitled to OSP
For employees who are entitled to the Occupational Sick pay, follow the same steps to create a LAT. This gives them the leave they are entitled to.
This enabled OSP category will show the entitlement within the LAT screen.
Important
If your employee works more or less than the standard hours per day (set in payroll settings > details) their OSP daily pay may be calculated incorrectly. You can either utilise the employees ‘Advanced’ setting of standard work week within their pay run defaults or you can manually amend the occupational sick pay within the sickness entry screen each period.
For public holidays to be ignored for purposes of occupational sick pay, go to the bank holidays section in payroll settings, select the bank holiday and add the locations of the business to the settings.
For the purposes of reporting, tags can be created for Occupational sick leave.
- Click Add.
- Add a title and confirm by clicking on the green tick.
- Click on Add a category.
- Select Occupational Sick Leave.
- Click Save.
- To Edit a tag click the pencil icon.
- To Delete a tag click the bin icon and confirm delete.
You can enter a sickness for an employee in the Statutory/Occupational Pay section.
- Click on Employee menu.
- Select the Employee List.
- Navigate to or search for the employee you need to enter the information for.
- Select Statutory/Occupational Pay from the Pay run setting menu.
- Click Add.
- Select the Occupational sick leave category (there should only be one to choose from providing you have only set one type up or you have followed the LAT rule).
- Add the dates of the sickness.
- The OSP amount due and details about how many days are to be unpaid/paid will show along with what service band the employee falls into.
- In Advanced options you can override the OSP amount, amend the service band, add a reporting tag and add any attachments such as a sick note. You can also add any notes here.
Important
Amending the service band is useful for situations such as an employee who has been TUPE’d, where their start date does not reflect what sickness entitlement they are attached to. Changing the band will amend the Accrued Units/Balance on the main screen and pay the relevant amount of sickness entitlement.
Clicking the blue ‘i’ next to the OSP amount will give further information on how the sickness has been calculated.
- Click Save.
- A corresponding SSP record will be saved alongside the OSP record added.
Helpful Hint
The ‘Accrued units’, ‘Taken units’ and ‘Balance’ shows the total at today’s date. The blue ’i’ gives further information on how it has been calculated.
- The sickness can be edited using the pen icon or deleted using the red bin icon.
- Once the sickness has been paid in a pay run and the pay run has been finalised, the sickness will not be able to be deleted.
- Open the pay run that corresponds to the record you just created. You can do this by navigating by date.
- Select the employee you wish to edit the OSP for.
- Expand these employee details.
- In the open pay run the OSP can be edited using the edit icon.
- You can also enter the OSP in the open pay run by selecting Actions.
- Then click Pay occupational leave.
- Select Leave Category.
- Click Occupational Sick Pay.
- From here, the details can be edited as normal in the statutory panel.
Import historical sick leave
- Log into your payroll platform.
- Click on Business on the left-hand side menu.
- Click on Payroll Settings.
- Click on Import Historical Sickness on the left-hand side menu.
- Click on Data Extracts page.
- Choose the following:
- Data type
- File format
- Click Download.
- Fill in the following fields in the downloaded spreadsheet:
- EmployeeId
- SicknessStartDate
- SicknessEndDate
- OSPAmount
- BasicPayAdjustmentType
- OSPUnpaidDays
- OSPTotalSickDays
- OSPAmountWasOverridden
- OSPLeaveCategory
- Notes
- SSPQualifies
- SSPQualifyingDays
- SSPWaitingDaysUsed
- SSPAmount
- Click back on Import Historical Sickness on the left-hand side menu.
- Click on Select File.
- Choose your completed occupational absence spreadsheet.
- Click on Confirm Upload.
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