There are several ways paid time off can be granted to or earned by employees:

1. Lump sum with use it or lose it.
2. Lump sum with limited carryover.
3. Rolling accrual per pay period and carryover.

Different types of Paid Time Off (PTO) may be accrued differently. For instance, vacation may be accrued on a rolling basis and carried over year to year, where sick time may be a lump sum accrual on the first day of the calendar year with use it or lose it.

Vacation accrual set up can be done at any point in the year. It can be done at the time the employee is first added to the system or it can be added to existing employees. In either case you will start by selecting the Payroll tab from the home screen.

Select List of Employees and then chose to either "Add a new Employee" or highlight the employee whose PTO you'd like to set up and chose "Update Employee."

If an employee gets 5 days of sick time per calendar year on a use it or lose it basis, then you would put 40 hours in Allocated and use 01/01/yyyy as the Start date where the y's are the 4-digit year. Each year you would reset the allocation and use the new January 1 start date.

As an example of lump sum with carry forward, let's say that every year on the employee's anniversary date, they are awarded another personal day and they are allowed to accumuldate personal days if they go unused year to year. It would work much the same as the sick leave example except that the start date would be the anniversary date and the Allocated box would have the sum of unused hours plus the additional 8 hours.

Vacation may accrue on a rolling basis. In this example, we'll say as of the employee's first anniversary they earn 10 hours of vacation per month...that means 5 hours are earned per pay period. In months that have an extra pay period, it is possible to select not to accrue vacation on the final pay period of the month. So you would enter the employee's anniversary date as the start date and 5 as the Period Accrual.

Whenever you add a PTO allocation or Period Accrual, you need to make sure you click on Recalculate Hours and Save Employee and Exit. That will populate or re-populate your Paid/Used/Taken and Balance fields.

You will need to set up corresponding Hour Types to record the use of PTO on time sheets to keep balances accurate. In order to do this, you will select the "Various Types" sub-tab and the "List of Hour Types" button. You should use the numbers corresponding to those in the benefits tab to set up the hour types if you don't have them set yet. (i.e. 5 for Vacation Time, 6 for Sick Time, 7 for Personal Time, and 8 for Compensatory Time). If you do not have them set, you will click on "Add an Hour Type."

This will bring up the following form. Be sure to set your Hour Type to the appropriate number. Make sure you check Benefit Hours, Accrue Benefits for these hours and Productive Hours. Your rate type is in all likelihood Regular. Make sure you add a description that's appropriate to describe the time category on paystubs and reports. And then be sure to Save Hour Type and Exit.

When it is time to enter an employee's time sheet for payroll, this pop-up will appear when you click "Add a New Time Sheet." If it is an extra pay period in a month or you have only a single PTO benefit that accrues more slowly than on a pay period basis (i.e. 1 sick day per 4 months of service) you would click "No" when you didn't want to add the hours. Otherwise, your answer should be yes.

When you enter an employee's time sheet, you will add separate entries for each type of PTO that you utilize as is applicable. In this situation, we accrued 5 additional hours to vacation, worked 72 hours and had 8 hours of sick time. By selecting time type 6, entering the number of hours used and making sure "Used or Taken" is marked, it will record this against the balance of sick time available on the paystub.