Advanced payroll furlough holiday top up

I'll share some information about this, @csacs100.

I understand that the setup should track and deduct your leave balance. However, how QuickBooks calculates it is working as design. You can either add it as earning items or continue to track it manually.

Refer to this article for adding earning lines to a pay run in QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll.

If you need further assistance with the setup, please contact our Payroll Support. They can guide you through the process. Here's how to reach out:

1. Go to Help at the top.
2. Scroll down and tap Contact Us.
3. Enter "annual leave" in the field, then select Let's talk.
4. Click Chat.

As always, feel free to visit our page if you need help with other payroll tasks. Just look for topics that fit your concern. Here's the link: QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll hub.

Please know that you're always welcome to post or reply anytime if you have other questions or concerns with payroll. I'm more than willing to assist you. Take care and have a good one.

Thank you for your response ShiellaGrace,

If I am unable to allocate my Annual Leave Furlough days to my Annual Leave balance then there is no point in tracking holidays in Advanced Payroll.  If the system is designed not to assist with this type of thing then that is a flaw in the design, in my opinion.

Adding an additional line of income does not resolve the Leave balance issue. If I add it as Annual Leave then the system will want to pay annual leave at normal pay rate, not the 20% rate and using the Take Leave option prevents me from changing the rate of pay for Annual leave. 

There must be thousands of businesses with the same issue and I was hoping somebody who has been using Advanced Payroll for an extended period would have worked out a solution and would share it.

It is possible there is another way of getting Furloughed Annual Leave to calculate at the correct rate (currently 20% of normal wage, though this will change in July and again in August so pay rates for all staff will need to be amended manually twice) and adjust the Annual Leave days balance, but it would appear that Quickbooks is unwilling to make that information freely available, if it is indeed possible, or to amend the design to cope with this if it is not currently possible.

I am sure I am not the only business with this requirement.

Hi csacs100

You can create an additional leave catorgory set this to auto accrue and enter how much you want it to accrue for
Use pay rate of the employee's primary pay category for transferred earnings line and apply againts the pay catogry if you wish,

This will show on payrun as leave accrued and can edit as needed

Thanks John.

Unfortunately that does not help track Annual leave properly, merely creates an additional category to track.

I can get my income correct, but can't track the leave days balance correctly.

Staff are entitled to 20 days leave. If a member of staff takes 10 days annual leave (at normal rate) and 10 days Annual leave while on furlough (at 20% top up rate) they will have used up their 20 days. How do I know in advance how many days of each type of leave each employee is going to take so I can accrue it properly?

Hi csacs100 We appreciate that this may be another leave category however have you tried in the additional category that we suggested editing the settings to custom and then select deduct the hours from the main leave category.and 'Transfer hours to' as the new leave category yoou've set up?

Hi John,

I tried that. I think that only affects the Earnings, not the Leave balance.

Settings as follows:

Leave balance after processing shown below:

Hi csacs100 We appreciate that this may be another leave category however have you tried in the additional category that we suggested editing the settings to custom and then select deduct the hours from the main leave category.and 'Transfer hours to' as the new leave category yoou've set up?

John, that is the same response as your previous one. Not sure if sent in error.

Thanks for getting back to us, csacs100.

I'm here to help you with your payroll concern. 

To set up your leave categories, you may refer to this article: Leave Categories & Leave Accrual in Advanced Payroll

You can also follow my colleague @John C, edit the settings to custom and then select deduct the hours from the main leave in the additional category.

For further assistance, you can reach out to our Payroll Support Team. They can guide you through the process. Here's how to contact them:

1. Go to Help at the top.
2. Scroll down and tap Contact Us.
3. Enter "annual leave" in the field, then select Let's talk.
4. Click Chat.

For future reference, you can check out  this article: Leave Adjustments in QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll

Let me know if you have additional questions about payroll process. I'd love to help you more.

Thank you Abegail.

I am fairly comfortable with the leave setups etc. but can't get what I need from the system based on the information you have provided, all of which require some form of manual adjustment to employee pay to get both the pay and the Leave balance to be correct.

I either need to adjust the Leave days or the rate of pay for Annual Leave Furlough to get both numbers correct.

At the moment, based on all of the feedback to date, not tracking leave in Advanced Payroll would appear to be the best option.

One further issue I have on this subject is that I have created a Linked Pay category to my Hourly Pay for the Annual Leave Furlough rate, being an 80% Penalty Loading on my normal Hourly rate, which should give me the correct  Furlough Leave top up 20% rate. 

Pay category setup below:

For some reason, the rate does not pull through to the Earnings. My current setup is as follows:

On the relevant employee in the pay run I select Action, Take leave and then select Annual Leave Furlough and then enter the relevant hours which automatically reduces the hourly pay by the leave hours and creates the Annual Leave Furlough earnings line and hours, but with a 0 rate per hour. This should simply pull through as 20% of the Hourly rate per the Linked category, but doesn't. Any idea as to why it isn't working?

I have created a new pay run for this, so everything should have updated before I ran it.

If I manually enter the rate under Employees, Pay rates then it pulls through correctly, but I would have to make manual adjustments to all of my employees rates every time something changed, which is what I thought the Linked category was meant to alleviate.

Hello Csacs100,. Thanks for getting back to us. While we see what you would like to do. You can track/accrue leave against two different pay categories by having two different leave categories, the leave balances for both of them feed do feed from one source and this means you would have to do manual adjustments. We can pass on feedback to the payroll developers and would encourage you to leave feedback in the cog>feedback within the product as well.

Thank you Emma.

Any comment as to why my Linked pay category is not pulling through automatically?

Thanks for coming back to the Community, csacs100.

Let’s run the browser troubleshooting to get the linked pay category to calculate automatically. This is the initial action to perform when you experience unusual behavior in QBO.

To begin, open your company via incognito mode or private browsing. Doing so allows the online program to run without collecting cache and cookies. It’s also a good place to start to check if the issue is caused by the cache.

Here are the shortcut keys for each browser:

• Press Ctrl + Shift + N (Google Chrome).
• Press Ctrl + Shift + P (Mozilla Firefox).
• Press Command + Shift + N (Safari).

If the Linked Categories work in a private window, clear the cache of your regular browser. This process will help fetch the latest version of the webpage and a faster browsing experience. If none of these steps work, use another browser to check if the issue is browser-related.

Also, review the employee’s pay types and make sure to link the categories. For more details, check out this article: Creating & managing pay categories in QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll.

To learn more about the tasks you can accomplish in QuickBooks Online Advanced Payroll, tap this link to access our self-help articles. These resources outlines the complete steps on how to perform each process.

Feel free to drop a comment below if you have any more questions. I’m always ready to answer them for you. Have a great day ahead.

Thank you Rasa-Lila.

That has now created additional Pay categories under the main pay category. As I was originally unaware that we could link pay categories I had already created standalone Furlough and Annual Leave Furlough Pay categories, which I will no longer need. I don't think I can delete those standalone categories if I have already used them in the tax year. I am still in Test mode with HMRC, so I assume I can delete all of my Pay Runs to date and redo them if I am unable to delete the standalone categories having already used them and then start again.

Pay categories below:

Pay rates with Linked rates calculating correctly.