Contract Options

In this article we will go over the various options you have to adjust when editing a contract and creating a contract. 

Contract Options: Details

Each contract has a collection of options which will restrict an employee's working hours, allocate them holiday and change the reports that can be seen.

Contract Details

• Contract Title - The name of the contract.
• Contract Type - This groups different types of contract together and can change the language used about a contract, so freelancers sign an agreement, volunteers sign terms & conditions and employees sign an employment contract.

Contract Documents

• Contract Document - This feature enables online signing of employment contracts. You will need to Create a Contract Document to be used for the contract and this can be a copy and paste from Word. Once created, you can use the same Contract Document on multiple contracts.This will force staff to sign a digital copy of the contract document if they’ve not yet signed one or the previous document has expired.

Contract Hours

• Period - The length of time over which the following hour limits should be applied.
• Start Date - This is when the period starts. The system will automatically calculate periods before and after this date. It’s designed to roll each year.
• Expected Minimum Hours - For permanent & contracted staff, this will be the number of hours you expect them to complete each contracted period. The TOIL settings then allow reporting on rolled hours month to month.For casual staff this is purely advisory and allows a report to be shown on how many hours each employee has completed this period.
• Expected Minimum Hours: Exclude Dates - This allows you to tell the system not to apply the expected minimum hours for these staff members during the dates listed in the Exception Dates. It’s perfect for staff who only work hours during specific terms or periods.
• Swapping Shifts

This setting instructs the system on what to do if the staff member tries to reduce their hours below their contracted minimum expected hours.

Contract Options: Working Pattern

The working pattern tab allows you to specify exactly what times of day a staff member works, as well as the days of the week. This is particularly useful for part time staff members or staff members working unusual shift patterns. What this means is that the system is not looking at hours per period and this is instead based on their scheduled shifts.

Absences will only be deducted on working days and if they have a shift scheduled. The system will automatically know which days are eligible for Sick pay based on your working pattern. 

• Standard Working Days
  These are the regular working days which staff members will be expected to work under this contract. You can now specify whether this will include morning and evenings or both.
• Normal Hours per full day
  This option allows you to choose how many hours are in a given standard working day excluding breaks. This is used in various parts of the system. If shifts can vary greatly, try to provide an average.
• Normal Hours per half day
  This option allows you to choose how many hours are in a half day excluding breaks. This might be different from half of the full working day if you exclude longer breaks that are not included.
• Normal Day Start Time
  This is the default start time for the first half of a working day; this is used to help calculate normal working hours and requests that fall outside of a normal working day.

Contract Options: Breaks, Rests & Limits

• Schedule Limit: Maximum Hours This limit is used by the intelligent schedule creation tool when assigning shifts. It will never assign more hours than this setting within a given contract period. Staff can still be manually assigned or take additional shifts above these hours.
• General Limit: Maximum Hours This hard limit is designed to prevent staff working too many hours in a given time period. Exactly what happens once the limit is reached is controlled by the Overage Rule.
• General Limit: Overage Rule This setting decides what should be done once the employee reaches the max hours per period.
  • Never allow staff to be scheduled or paid in excess of these hoursUse this option for staff who have legal limits on hours they can work (Tier 2 and Tier 4 visas for example). They will never be allowed to be scheduled for more than the max hours and wage sheets will be blocked if the hours are exceeded until the issue is resolved.
    
    
  • Allow additional hours and either pay staff or allow TOILThis means the max hours will be used for advisory reports only.
    
    
  • In general, do not allow staff to be assigned additional hours but allow managers to override via assign shift only. This will prevent the hours being breached by additional shifts or cover shifts. Managers can override this by assigning a shift via the shift grid only. All other ways of assigning a shift or extending hours on a shift will be blocked.
    
    
  • Never allow staff to be assigned additional hours but pay or allow TOIL for any overtime as normalThis will prevent a staff member from being assigned any additional hours but if they are clocked in for longer then this will not block a wage sheet and will allow the payment.
    
    
• General Limits: Exclude Dates This allows you to tell the system not to apply the general limit hours for these staff members during the dates listed in the Exception Dates. It’s perfect for staff who are allowed to work longer hours outside of term dates or particular periods.
• Enforced Rest These settings will enforce a break between shifts once they reach a certain length. If a shift is X hours long then it will not allow a shift before or after this shift for the number of hours specified.
• Overnight Enforced Rest This enforces the specified period if the shift passes over midnight; it means that rest periods can be enforced for short shifts if they are worked late at night.
• Breaks Here you can select the break policy you want to use when the staff member is working under this contract.
• Additional Restrictions Here you can choose which contract restrictions should be enforced on this contract. You can create your own contract restrictions under Pay > Contracts > Restriction Rules.

Contract Options : Holiday

• • Earning Holiday
    How should staff earn holiday hours within this contract? 

  This can be fixed entitlements, pay as they earn, earn and claim and more.

  • Calculation Method

  This allows you to choose whether to calculate holiday based on actual shifts scheduled or simply allow full and half days to be booked.

  • Show Entitlement As
    This allows you to either show your holiday entitlement as raw hours or days.
  • Holiday Entitlement
    These settings will only appear for permanent or contracted staff. For casual staff, you can set up automatic holiday payments in pay elements.
    The entitlement is a starting point for holiday allowances over the course of the business year. The year start date can be set under System > Configuration >  Global Settings. See holiday for more information on how holidays work in StaffSavvy.
  • Maximum Days per week
    Decide whether there will be a limit on how many days are deducted during the week. Maximum of 7 days per week to be deducted.
  • Existing Shifts
    This option decides whether you want holiday days to be deducted from a staff member’s working pattern exclusively, or to only deduct days within their working pattern when they also have shifts booked. 
  • Add Holiday Time Entries
    This allows you to auto-add holiday time entries for approved or unapproved holidays. Recommended if using TOIL.
  
  
  • National/Organisation Holidays
    These options determine if the various types of national holidays are deducted from their holiday entitlement or not. There are also options to auto-book in the days for these holidays. This will automatically add the holiday requests for the staff on this contract and deduct them from their entitlement (if that’s the option above).
    
    
  • Length Of Service Additional Entitlements

  This option increases holiday options in correlation with the length of service a Staff Member has given.

  • Rolling Allowance
    These options determine if any unused/owed allowances can be rolled into the following year. You can also set a limit of how much can be rolled.
    Managers will still be able to review and approve the rolling of hours but these settings mean they will automatically be capped to save time.
  • Warnings and Request Blocking

  These options allow the exclusion of certain dates as options to be booked off for Holidays. Alternatively, you can choose to set up a warning message if certain dates are requested.

  
  Contract Options: Time Off / Time Owed In Lieu Settings

• TOIL Mode Allows you to enable/disable TOIL tracking
  • Automatic TOIL CalculationThis is an automated management process for flexitime/TOIL. Using expected hours and actual recorded time, the system will report on how a staff member is doing against their expected hours.

This can be seen at a glance on their profile and dashboard or managers will see a notification for all their staff who are under/over hours on their dashboard.This is the easiest process but requires staff to report all their hours.

• Manual TOIL Requests This process allows staff to make requests for TOIL hours to be added to their account. Managers receive notifications and approve/reject these requests.Staff can then view their approved hours and claim against their TOIL hours with managers approving these claims in the same way.It allows a manual but managed process to track TOIL or flexitime within the system

• Enabled When This decides when we start counting TOIL based on how many hours over the expected hours the staff member has performed. Roll time owned in blocks ofThis allows you to only roll hours in specific lengths.
• Limit on Rolled Hours This allows you to limit how many hours can be rolled from a given period. This prevents too many hours being rolled forward or back.

Contract Options: Absences

• Policy Set
  The absence policy determines any pay entitlements for absences such as sickness. You can have different absence policies for different staff and choose the correct absence policy to be in place for each contract.
• Sickness Review

This allows you to choose whether it is necessary to require all sickness periods to be confirmed by a manager.

Contract Options: Shifts & Time Entries

• Allow Shifts From
  This allows a contract to restrict where the staff member can receive shifts. For example, they might be ‘bank’ staff that can only be manually assigned shifts by managers rather than being included in schedules by default.
• Shift Confirmation or Acknowledgement
  The ability to require staff on this contract to either acknowledge their shifts (so you can see which have been seen and accepted) or confirm their shifts. Confirming also allows them to reject the shift if they cannot work it.
• Minimum Shift Length
  This is the minimum length of shift you can assign to someone on this contract. 
• Maximum Shift Length
  This is the maximum length of shift you can assign to someone on this contract.
• Minimum Paid Shift Length
  This will ensure all time entries are paid as though the staff member has worked at least this amount of time. Shift budgets, contracted hours and staffing costs will use this minimum length. Staff will be paid as though they have worked this amount of time even if they were clocked in for much less.
  It will not affect working restrictions so staff can be paid the minimum amount for showing up to a short shift and then return to work later in the day.
  Note: Changing this setting will cause shifts and unapproved time entries to be re-calculated. 
• Time Entry confirmation
  By default, managers need to approve each time entry before it will go into a wage sheet.

This option enables an additional stop where staff must confirm their approved time entries before they will be processed. So managers still approve the time entries but then staff receive a notification here they can accept or question each approved time entry. Only confirmed time entries will be processed into a wage sheet.

• Budgets
  This option allows you to choose how the system budgets for staff on this contract. It allows you to provide different budget figures so that managers using the budget system cannot see their actual salary or rate of pay.
  • Expected/accurate times
    The system will use their expected rate of pay to calculate budgets
  • Fixed cost per hour
    The system will ignore their expected rate of pay and simply use this hourly rate in all cases
  • Fixed budget per half day
    The system will round any shift up to the nearest ½ day based on the hours in a day set on the previous pages. This is then budgeted at the figure provided.
    Note: working just a few mins over the boundary into two half days will be budgeted as a full day.
  • Fixed budget per full day
    The system will round any shift up to the nearest full day based on the hours in a day set on the previous pages. This is then budgeted at the figure provided.
    Note: working just a few minutes will still be budgeted as a full day
• Lock Pay Element

This option locks the staff member's pay elements for all of the roles covered by this contract to use their default role rate. Alternatively, you can allow each role to have a different rate of pay.

• Override Pay Element
  If you have contracted or permanent staff who are paid a fixed salary for their hours and are paid separately for any additional hours then use this setting. When enabled, all hours below the maximum contracted hours in a given month will be set to the chosen pay element. The pay element should be set to be 0 per hour.
  Once the employee has worked their maximum number of hours then any additional hours in the month will be paid as per the normal rates on the skills/roles for that employee.

Contract Options: Full Time Equivalent Options

This option allows you to customise a staff member’s contract by using a full time equivalent contract. Essentially this allows you to configure a full time contract and then set a staff member’s part time hours on their account alone. This will reduce their holiday, contracted hours and maximum hours accordingly.
Note: We do not recommend that you rush to change all of your contracts to FTE versions. We recommend this is tested on some dummy accounts first or applied to new starters first rather than changing existing configuration that is working well for you.
This option can also be used to change the working days of a staff member if they are different from the default contract.
The option to reduce their contract is set on their contract when you assign them to the contract.

You can choose three types of less than full time:
Part time (Reduced Days)
This is used for Staff Members who only work certain days, rather than a full working week. Once chosen, you will be able to choose which days of the week they will be working. This is completed in morning and afternoon sections so you can add half days.
The system will calculate a FTE figure by comparing the number of half days selected for this staff member to the contract default.
Part time (Reduced Hours)
This can be used when staff members always work fewer hours each day. For example if the default contract was 9am - 5pm, these workers might work 9am - 12pm. This is then calculated by percentage, so if a staff member is working 50% of the regular contracted hours you would put in 0.5 into the box. This will reduce their working hours per day by this percentage.
Part time (Regular Repeating Shifts)
This is perfect for staff who have complex working patterns that are set using Regular Repeating Shifts. The system will review their regular repeating shifts, calculate the average number of hours per contract period and set this as their FTE figure. For example, if you have a two week shift pattern with the first week having 30 hours of shifts and the second week having 0 hours, it will calculate the average week as 15 hours. If the contract is set to be 30 hours a week, the FTE figure will be 0.5 (50%).

This is particularly useful if your company has several staff members with a regular repeating shift pattern, as the system will work out their hours for them. Therefore, managers will not have to manually calculate the hours worked for every single staff member using this type of shift pattern. Holiday allowances will be automatically calculated based on the FTE figure.

Different working days
If your staff member works the contracted hours as per the contract but on different days to the contract settings then you can set this on the contract settings too. Just uncheck Default Contract days.