Here at actiPLANS, we are invested in providing the best experience for our software users and meeting their work-related needs. Thus, we’ve introduced a couple of new essential features to our platform in 2024, and in this post, we want to remind you of how they can make your work life easier.
So, let’s talk about PTO blackout days and biweekly PTO accruals + see how to implement them in real-life scenarios.
PTO Blackout Days for the Busiest Business Periods
Every good employer knows that providing employees with enough time off is key to high team productivity and morale. However, sometimes there are periods of time when you simply can’t let anyone take even an hour of leave and all your staff members should be fully immersed in work.
Designed specifically for demanding and challenging circumstances like these, the PTO blackout functionality in actiPLANS allows you to restrict leave requests whenever your workloads are out of control and project deadlines are extremely tight.
All you have to do is just mark the necessary dates in your Corporate Calendar as PTO blackout days and specify which leave types should be blocked during those dates. After that, employees won’t be able to make leave requests during the set PTO blackout period, and you can rest assured that everyone is present at the workplace when they are needed most and no leave time gets approved by accident.
Use Case:
Company overview
Mark runs a small AI tech company, Genesis, and is currently working on a very important project that he has carefully planned out in advance. Everything goes well, all the required resources are in the right place, and tasks get completed one by one.
Problem
Then, one of the key employees unexpectedly takes an extended break from work to take care of a personal emergency. Unfortunately, Genesis has no equal substitute for that employee’s talent on the team, and there’s no time to go through the entire recruitment and hiring process at the moment – all the company’s efforts must be dedicated to the project at hand.
Steps taken with actiPLANS
Mark decides to involve some employees in overtime work and introduce the PTO blackout period till the end of the project (so no one else takes days off for sure).
He explains the situation to his team and, to sell them the idea of overtime and PTO blackout days, offers them a generous time off in lieu allowance along with overtime pay by the end of the project. Once their consent is secured, Mark proceeds to configure the PTO blackout period in actiPLANS:
Step 1: He marks every date till the end of the project as a PTO blackout day.
Step 2: He makes sure every leave type he has in the system is going to be blocked during the set PTO blackout period.
Step 3: To comply with fair labor regulations, Mark keeps sick leave and FMLA leave unblocked (because he has no legal right to make employees work when they don’t feel well or are contagious to others).
Step 4: He checks the Leave Scheduling timeline to see if the PTO blackout period is highlighted there correctly and if not a single day is missed at the first step of the configuration process.
Step 5: Mark and his team gets right back to work on the project, trying to make the best out of the available resources at your disposal.
Outcomes
After two weeks of hard work, the project is successfully delivered to the client, and Genesis team members can now start to schedule absences as usual and enjoy well-deserved days off.
Most importantly, Mark has learned an important lesson from the incident and will 100% make sure to add some buffer time to his next project’s schedule – just in case a key employee suddenly gets sick or quits their job. And even if a PTO blackout period would be hard to avoid again, he’ll stick to actiPLANS again since it has proved to be reliable in this regard.
Biweekly PTO Accrual for Accurate Payroll
There is more than one way to approach PTO accrual and, since 2024, actiPLANS allows you to choose from a wider list of options thanks to its new biweekly PTO calculation feature.
It’s quite common for employers to pay employees every two weeks, so biweekly PTO accruals also make total sense. And even if you’re just considering shifting to biweekly payroll calculations, actiPLANS will make your transition smooth by automating leave balance calculations and keeping them error-free.
Use Case:
Company overview
A year ago, Toby opened a small restaurant and started to adhere to a monthly PTO accrual and pay schedule for employees, thinking that such an approach would require fewer calculations and administrative work overall.
Problem
After a while, several part-time workers began to ask for advance payments every single month – it turned out they had trouble stretching out their earned money throughout the month.
Steps taken with actiPLANS
As a people-oriented employer, Toby wanted to make life a bit more convenient and easier for his part-timers (and get rid of that extra work associated with the advance pay calculations). Thus, he decided to introduce biweekly accruals and make every second Friday as the official payday for the entire team.
As for PTO accruals, Toby has delegated this task to actiPLANS:
Step 1: He fine-tuned the default PTO settings in line with the new rules.
Step 2: He set personal PTO balance calculation rules for his part-time employees since their accrual rate is 2x smaller than the full-timers’ rate.
Outcomes
After that, work routines at the restaurant proceeded as normal yet employees started to get their paycheck every second Friday instead.
On the first paydays after the change in his approach to payroll accruals, Toby also checked employees’ PTO balances in actiPLANS – the system always calculated them with infallible precision. So, after a while, he stopped worrying about this aspect of payroll management at all and finally got what he strived for – fewer administrative burdens and much more time to focus on developing his restaurant and bonding with his team.
Conclusion
That was a brief recap of the two biggest updates actiPLANS underwent in 2024. This year, we promise to come up with even more excellent features and enhancements – you can always learn more about them on this page once they are released.
Thanks for reading and choosing actiPLANS as your work and leave scheduling software!
