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Shannon83
Level 3

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Good morning,

I'm learning Quickbooks right now, so please be patient. I am taking over someone else's position, so I was just kind of thrown in. My employer would like a way to accrue and pay out banked hours in Quickbooks, not the spreadsheet we are currently using. And then we would like to do the same thing with Vacation pay. Is there a way to do this? Can I do both on the same file? Any advice is appreciated. Thanks Shannon

14 Comments 14
Tammy_H
QuickBooks Team

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Hi Shannon,

 

I know stepping into a new position brings some challenges, but you're already off to a great start by knowing to reach out here in the QuickBooks Community for assistance. QuickBooks Desktop is a powerful program with the option of attaching a comprehensive payroll module. I have the information to get you started.

 

You can find the option to purchase the payroll add-on feature through this link: Payroll and Enterprise options for QuickBooks Desktop. In this article, Set up Payroll, you'll find all the steps for setting up your employees, pay schedules, tax information, contributions and benefits. If you have any questions about this, reach back out.

 

Have a great day!

Shannon83
Level 3

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Thank you so much for getting back to me. We have already purchased the Payroll Module, and it was setup prior to the change in administration. I have found where to put the information, but I am having trouble finding where to enter the "limits". An example: We work 37.5 hour work weeks. What I would like to happen is for anything above 37.5 hours to go into the banked hours account, but I can't seem to figure out how to get that setup. 

Also, does the accrual of banked hours really work? There is a spreadsheet that is used here, and I'd love to stop using it if I don't have to. 

 

Thanks so much!

Tammy_H
QuickBooks Team

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

 

Thanks for reaching back out with the additional information. I can explain how the accruals will work. The accrual can be set for every paycheque, hour worked or the beginning of the year or manually. If you're using it for banked time, you may want to set it for manually. There is no setting to set a limit for it to do this automatically.

 

This article has the steps for setting the accruals up: Want to set up employee defaults? After you take a look at that, you can let me know if you have any questions.

Rochelley
Level 8

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Hi @Shannon83 ,

 

I believe I can help you with this.  Regarding banked overtime, I made a post awhile ago about this for someone who was asking about banking overtime in QBO.  However, the process is exactly the same in QB Desktop.  If you have questions after reading through the post, feel free to reach out to me for any clarification you may need.

 

https://quickbooks.intuit.com/learn-support/en-ca/employees-payroll/is-it-possible-to-bank-overtime/...

 

I believe your question about accruing Vacation is regarding accruing Vacation Hours.  Unfortunately, QBD does not accrue vacation hours, only $.  I still keep a spreadsheet outside of QBD to get a handle on how many "equivalent" hours people have as it relates to the $ they have accrued.  If you have your payroll items set up to accrue vacation, then the vacation accrual accumulated, less any vacation paid out will be the Vac $ Avail balance showing on each paystub.  Vacation pay is a monster and and many people have trouble with it, complicated by each province having its own laws regarding it.

 

For example, in my province, people are entitled to 120 number of hours (3 weeks) per year with under 10 years of service.  But they are also entitled to 5.769% of all their regular and overtime earnings as vacation pay.  What that results in is a higher amount of vacation $ available than time entitlement.

 

The way it is supposed to work in our province is that employees are not supposed to be able to take vacation for a full year (or until Dec 31 if you want everyone to have a common anniversary date).  Then, what they have accrued in $ as of Dec 31 of any given year, they are entitled to be paid as they take as their vacation entitlement days in the following year.  Technically, if an employee worked no overtime (maybe such as a salaried employee), the amount they are paid for the vacation they take is identical to their regular wages.  But if an employee works a lot of overtime, then they are entitled to be paid the % of that overtime, but still only are entitled to the same number of days. 

 

Example:

Joe's regular hourly rate is $30.00 / hr.

Joe works 2080 regular hours in the 2020.  His regular annual wages are $62,400.00.

When Joe takes his 3 weeks of vacation in 2021 that he accrued in the 2020, he will be paid $30.00 / hr for each hr of vacation he takes.  Broken down hourly, the calculation would be as follows:  3 weeks = 120 hours x $30.00 / hr = $3,600.00 vacation pay in 2021.  You could also come to the same conclusion if you did the following calculation:  $62,400 / 52 weeks = $1,200 / wk x 3 weeks vacation = $3,600.00.

 

Vacation scenario with overtime:

Joes' regular hourly rate is $30.00 / hr.  His OT rate is $45.00 / hr (assuming OT is paid out at time and one half).

Joe works his regular 2080 hours in 2020.  But he also worked 300 hours of overtime.  Joe's annual salary in 2020 ends up being $75,900.00.  Now Joe is entitled to be paid $4,378.67 for vacation pay in 2021.  But he still is only entitled to 120 hours.  That means when Joe is paid his hourly vacation rate in 2021, he must be paid at a rate of $36.4889 / hr instead of $30.00 per hour.

 

In my province, this is how it is supposed to work, and I assume many other provinces will be much the same with slight variances.

 

However, the employer I work for does not require people to wait a year or to the end of the year to take vacation, and if they have $ in their vacation accrual, then they can take the equivalent time if they want to.  The end result is, because of the amount of overtime our employees put in, they end up being able to take 4 - 6 weeks of vacation a year, instead of 3.  Our director doesn't have a problem with that, as long as production continues seamlessly, which it mostly does.  He wants to keep employees happy and this extra time off does keep them happy.

 

On the downside, there are many employees using their vacation a day here and there, an hour here and there, and they're using it as fast as they earn it, meaning they have next to no balance in their vacation $ accrual at any given time; in fact, the vacation they are taking now is actually supposed to be next year's vacation, according to the legislation.  Our legislation is in place to protect employee's from themselves in a sense, so that they will actually get a mental and physical health break from working.  The people that use their vacation this way, unfortunately never get to experience that.  But they are all adults and can choose to not miss so much work that they are taking vacation pay for, or suck it up and acknowledge that they are whittling their vacation away little by little.

 

There are a few that save it up, don't take vacation for a year, and then use it the following year like they're supposed to.  It also means that I am paying out all vacation at their regular hourly rates.  This all leaves me with a dog's breakfast with which I have no choice other than to track both hours and $ in a spreadsheet, so when someone makes a time-off request, I know how much time they can actually take based upon the $ available, when being paid at their regular hourly rate.

 

That was probably waaaaaay more than you wanted to know.  In the meantime, I saw your second post about wanting to bank any OT over 37.5 hours.  Unfortunately, there is no automatic way to track bank time in QBD or QBO.  It needs to be entered at the timesheet level or in the employee's payroll profile each pay period.  I find it easier to deal with a the timesheet level.

 

Are you currently entering each employee's time into a timesheet that then transfers to the paycheques?  Also, does your province require you to bank time at the overtime rate?  For example, in my province if an employee wants to bank his overtime and we agree to let him, then it must be banked at the same OT rate as he would have been paid, e.g. time and a half.  If the employee works 1 hour overtime, he must be either paid at 1.5 times his hourly rate, or if he banks the time, then he gets to bank 1.5 hours, to be paid at a later time, at his regular rate.  In the end, he is still paid the same amount of money for that one hour of overtime.

 

Depending on whether you must bank time at the OT rate will determine how you would set up your payroll items and entered on the time cards.  I also have a kick-a$$ spreadsheet that I've been tweaking for a few years and it is a pretty simple matter for me to update all the vacation time and bank hours, as well as vacation $.  It just serves as a check and a balance to ensure that the correct info is being entered into QB.  Let me know if you need more help.  

 

Shannon83
Level 3

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Thank you so much for all of that. I really appreciate the help. This has been overwhelming, and learning by trial and error has been cumbersome. I will go through all of the directions and let you know how I fare. Have a great weekend, and thanks again

 

Shannon

sharieb
Level 2

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Hello!

I was also looking to see how to include an OT bank in QBD and just about to start the process you included in your link, but you didn't specify what kind each item was. When adding an item, I have the options of "wage", "addition", "deduction" "company contribution", or "other" in my QBD Payroll. Can you help me out with that?

erin-focus
Level 2

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Unfortunately, there is no automatic way to track bank time in QBD or QBO.  It needs to be entered at the timesheet level or in the employee's payroll profile each pay period.  I find it easier to deal with a the timesheet level.

 

I'm hopping on to an older thread here, but i have been trying to figure out how to show our employees how much banked time they have accrued. i only recently switched to QBO but when i was using Desktop, i would edit the internal pay stub email to indicate how much each employee had accrued. with QBO of course I'm not issuing pay stubs (i believe they view them via Workforce, whatever that is). you mentioned updating their individual payroll profiles... i can't see where or how to add accruing banked pay (for the record, we track their hours as 1.5x regular hours)

Trish_T
QuickBooks Team

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Hi erin-focus,

 

Thanks for joining us here.  Welcome!  QuickBooks Online doesn't currently have the feature to track overtime for your employees.  This would need to be tracked outside of the program.  To  review how to calculate banked overtime, follow our QuickBooks Blog.  If you'd like to see this option available in future updates, you can submit a suggestion to our Development Team.  Customer recommendations are greatly appreciated to assist with improving your overall customer experience with QuickBooks Online.

 

Please don't hesitate to reach back out if you have other questions.  We'd love to help!

erin-focus
Level 2

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

your development team link sends me to the "how to submit feedback" page and when i follow the instructions within, get this response: "We’ve closed the suggestion board. If you’re looking to share your ideas head over to our community, we'd love to hear from you. Access our community by going to https://quickbooks.intuit.com/community"

 

so I'm right back where i started. it doesn't seem like customer recommendations are appreciated after all.

 

also, i wasn't actually asking for help on calculating banked overtime; i was asking for specific instructions on how to update our employees' profiles so that they could see how much banked pay they've accrued.

Amanda-B
QuickBooks Team

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Hey erin-focus,

 

Thanks for reaching back out to us here. At this time, there isn't a way to track banked hours in QuickBooks. This means there also isn't a way for your employees to view their banked hours. This would need to be done outside of QuickBooks. 

erin-focus
Level 2

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

bummer, but thanks for actually addressing my question :)

Lee-Ann
Level 2

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

I track the bank hours on a spreadsheet and every pay period I enter the balance of the banked time in the memo section of each paycheque.  Until QBO can give us a way to track it in the system, this gives each employee the information on each paycheque.

Rochelley
Level 8

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

This post is likely much too late but those items should be set up as hourly wage items. 

Lee-Ann
Level 2

Banked Hours Accrual and Vacation Hour Accrual

Using hourly wage items does not allow us to put in negative hours when employee's want to bank hours for future pay out.

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