Timeoff In Lieu and Hours/Days

Time off in lieu is predominantly designed to be used in conjunction with timesheets where any surplus an employee works in a given week is entered into a time off in lieu which they can then book off at a later date.

The value in time off in lieu is always in hours. An employee is meant to work 40 hours a week but worked for 45 hours. This means, there is a surplus of 5 hours entered into time off in lieu.

Increasingly, clients are entering time off in lieu directly via Time off in lieu accrued. This is not an issue, but we get a lot of questions about situations where an employee's time off is in days. In this scenario, time off is requested in days but the figures in time off in lieu are in hours. How does this work?

Firstly, it is important to understand why we do this. Whether we allow you to enter time off in lieu in days or hours is largely irrelevant. At some point, there needs to be a conversion that takes place between hours and days. The one exception would be if an employee's time off in lieu was always exactly 1 day or 1/2 a day but this is very rare.

When an employee has a time off entitlement in days, the employee working pattern is entered as the days they work and the total number of hours they work.

For example, employee 1 works 37.5 hours Monday to Friday.

In this scenario, the system looks at their total hours and then the number of days and arrives at average hours per day figure. In our example scenario, 7.5 hours per day.

If the employee does not have values entered for this, the system then looks at the company-wide values for the standard working day and uses this for the average hours per day figure. Finally, we also check if the employee works at a site where there are site-level time off settings - if so these are used.

If all of these are blank, then we assume 8 hours per day.

Once we have this figure, we then will convert the value in time off in lieu into days - for example, an employee works 8 hours per day and you enter 24 hours into time off in lieu this shows as 3 days.

Please Note - This does not directly affect those whose time off allowances are entered in hours. While some of the calculations work in a similar way, there is no conversion requirement.