Let’s be honest…your staff care about ministry, but sometimes they need a break. Whether that’s staying home to take care of a sick child or taking a well-deserved vacation, they need to know how much time off they have available so they can plan accordingly.
If you’re the payroll administrator and your church has an accrual paid time off policy, you know at least one if not all of these struggles:
- Manually updating totals or creating spreadsheets to manage accrued time off
- Answering constant questions from your employees around their time off balances
- Not being able to see a clear report on how much time each employee has taken and has available
Plus, your employees struggle with feeling like a burden constantly having to ask you for their time off balances and not being able to simply see them on their own.
Realm Payroll, the integrated payroll solution available within Realm, now includes Paid Time Off Accrual, allowing your payroll administrator to enter and manage accrued time off rates and giving your employees a way to keep track of their time off balances.
Manage Current and Future Time Off Accrual Rates
Let’s take a few minutes and picture Emma, our Children’s Ministry Director, and Sandy, our Financial Director, and the interactions they have when dealing with Jane’s paid time off.
Emma has been working at the church for four years and her paid time off is set to accrue each pay period for both sick and vacation time. In the past, Sandy kept track of Emma’s PTO balance in a spreadsheet along with the PTO balances for other church employees. Sandy had to remember to go in after each paycheck and manually change Emma’s PTO balance to add what she accrued and remove what she used in that pay period.
As you can imagine, that can be quite tedious as Sandy has more to do than simply manage payroll. And because she used software such as Realm Payroll to manage employees and actually run payroll, she had to manually transfer those PTO balances from the spreadsheet to her payroll software. There’s plenty of room for error there!
With the addition of PTO Accrual in Realm Payroll, Sandy can now enter in the accrual rates for both sick and vacation time for Emma. Realm Payroll automatically accrues Emma’s PTO and Sandy doesn’t have to manually track anything in an outside spreadsheet.
Emma is set to hit her five year work anniversary in just a few months. The church rewards her five years of service with additional PTO. Before, Sandy would have to make a note to try and remember to go in her spreadsheet and increase Emma’s accrued time. With PTO Accrual in Realm Payroll, Sandy can go ahead and set a future rate to start on Emma’s five year anniversary date and let the system do the work for her.
Now let’s say their church has a policy they can only accrue up to 200 hours. Sandy can add that maximum accrued time into Realm Payroll and she’ll see a warning when Emma hits that amount so she knows to reach out to Emma and let her know. The same works for minimum time amounts. Sandy can set that to a specific amount and will view a warning when Emma hits that mark so she can let Emma know she is running low on her PTO hours.
Give Employees a Way to View Their Time Off
Now Emma just finished planning and overseeing a successful Vacation Bible School for the children’s ministry. She’s exhausted and needs a break, but she was sick earlier in the year and wants to know how much PTO she has left to be able to take that much-deserved day off. Usually, Emma has to go to Sandy and ask for that information, but Sandy is out for her family’s summer vacation. What will Emma do?
With PTO Accrual in Realm Payroll, Emma doesn’t have to run Sandy down and interrupt her to see her PTO balance. She can view her balances on her pay stub each pay period.
Quickly View Time Off for Multiple Employees
Emma and three other church employees all requested time off this August. Sandy doesn’t want to go to each employee’s record to view their time off balances. She wishes there was one place she can go to view all of their balances at the same time. And now she can!
Sandy can choose the Time Off Summary report for Realm Payroll and filter it for Emma and the other employees to see a list of their current time off totals including carryover, earned, taken, and balance. Sandy can also use that Time Off Summary to view all employees’ time off balances and carry over amounts at the end of the year.
If Sandy needed a bit more detail, such as the actual entries recorded for an employee’s time off, she can choose the Time Off Detail report which shows those entries that affect an employee’s balance including any carryover, earned, or taken amounts and the dates of those occurrences.
Summary
With Realm Payroll now including Paid Time Off Accrual, Sandy is able to simplify her payroll processes and eliminate the need for additional time-tracking tools like her spreadsheets. She’s able to let Realm Payroll work for her in accruing time off and communicating time off balances with employees on their pay stubs. And with Realm Payroll, she has reporting available to give her quick insight when it’s needed.
How are you managing your payroll today? If the answer is “spreadsheets” or “multiple systems”, take a look at Realm Payroll with Realm Accounting to see how an integrated payroll solution can work for you.
Want to learn more about Paid Time Off Accrual within Realm? Join our free Realm Accounting Webinar: Paid Time Off Accrual, hosted by MinistrySmart, to learn how to set accrual rates for employees, how to manage balances, and review available reports.
Leigh Ann Shelley joined the ACST team in 2019 as a Product Marketing Manager, overseeing the launch and overall communication of key solutions to support the church’s needs. Prior to joining ACST, she spent several years in communications and graphic design roles, most notably as a Communications Director for a large church in Florence, SC, where she leveraged Realm to help solve key ministry challenges.
