Grant annual leave credits, consolidate different leave types, clear pending leaves and more...
The leave year-end process is a crucial aspect of leave management in any organization. Even a single day's leave mismatch can result in cost implications for your organization and employees and needless loss of credibility for the organization, not to mention disgruntled employees.
What is the leave year-end process?
It is an annual exercise conducted by most companies at the end of the leave year. It ensures that all leave-related details, such as lapses, encashments, and carry-forward balances, are in order. When done correctly, the process's primary output is the accurate opening balance of leaves for all employees.
Lay your worries to rest with greytHR's leave management module, which includes leave year-end process as a critical feature. Let's look at the steps involved in the leave year-end process.
Step 1: Review attendance records
The task begins with the employees reviewing their attendance records for the whole year to ensure there are no gaps in marking their presence on working days.
Secondly, they update their leaves available as per the appropriate eligible categories (privilege or annual leave, casual leave, sick leave, public holidays, etc.).
Once done, their Manager has to review and take appropriate action to adjust and update leave balances.
Before you proceed with granting fresh leaves, make sure:
- There is no leave request pending approval.
- You have made changes to the current leave policy concerning the number of days elapsed, encashed, or carried forward.
Step 2: Update leave balances
Once the updated unavailed leave balances (if any) are available to the employees, they can decide to avail of further leave before the end of the year or carry them forward to the following year.
Some organizations prefer their employees avail of all their leaves before the year ends. At the same time, some allow unavailed leave to be carried forward to the next year (either all or up to some limited number of days, depending on their Company policy).
Some organizations even allow employees to encash unavailed leave through their payroll (again, either all unavailed leave or a limited number of days only) while some would lapse them at the end of the year.
There are some remote cases where employees ignore updating their attendance/leave records despite reminders and end up with a loss of pay (LOP). This situation can also happen if the employee has availed leaves over his/her quota.
Depending on employees' actions, the Payroll Manager downloads the data from the system as a part of the payroll input for any LOP for that month. With this, the exercise of the current year's leave quota management is complete.
Step 3: Allot new leaves
The Payroll Manager's next step is to ensure the employees receive their fresh quota of leaves for the following calendar year. This will happen either on the first day of January or immediately after that.
In an organization's eyes, leaves are equivalent to money - though, in current times, vacation seems like an investment in an employee's well-being and health. Either way, it is imperative to maintain a perfect leave management system.
In most organizations, it is difficult and cumbersome to maintain this data, update all transactions continuously, and update the employees manually.
A glance at the table below will help you compare and contrast Excel sheets against greytHR, which has a built-in advanced leave year-end process.
Leave year-end activity
Issues faced in Excel
The greytHR solution
Leave tracking
Rendered difficult due to scattered information found on emails, etc.
Time-consuming
Centralized location for all leave-related information
No redundancy implies a significantly reduced workload
Managing rules/formulae
Calls for an experienced Excel user with a thorough understanding of the application
Designed to be self-explanatory and can be handled effectively even by newbies
Availability of prompt support
Statutory compliance
Calls for manual updating of increasingly complicated statutory laws
Updated for 100% compliance at all times
Accurate opening balance
80% of companies take several weeks to generate accurate O/B for all employees
A one-click process on greytHR
Other issues
Lack of transparency
Highly people-dependent, leaving critical data at the mercy of individuals
Easily traceable and 100% transparent
All information is backed daily basis, making retrieval easy
Modern HR & payroll software today can automate this entire process from an end-to-end perspective and assist Payroll Managers in completing their Leave year-end task each year effortlessly.
Additionally, the employees and their respective managers will track the leave balance at any time in the system. This would help to manage resources optimally for managers, as updated and real-time data is available on-demand and anywhere. An important aspect would also be a significant improvement in employee satisfaction as all Leave policies are applied uniformly and transparently to all employees.
What can be a better way to understand a leave management system than by seeing it in action? Look at our videos on greytHR's automated leave year-end and manual leave year-end processes.
It need not be this complicated. Instead, opt for greytHR. Simplify to stand out.
Still in the dark? Here’s a chance to experience a free trial and take the right decision.
