Benefit Hours Accruals Processing Overview

To ensure that your employees receive vacation, sick, and other benefit time to which they are entitled, your firm sets up firm-wide and employee-specific benefit accrual information and accrues benefit hours regularly.

Benefit Hours Accruals Setup

Before processing accruals, your firm must set up a firm-wide pool of benefit accrual codes on the Benefit Accrual Setup tab of the Time Analysis form, and then associate the appropriate codes with individual employees on the Accounting tab of the Employee Info Center.

You can configure Vision to monitor benefit hours on the Time Analysis report.

Benefit Hours Accruals Processing

You can process benefit accruals using one or both of the following methods:

  • Process benefit hours based on a frequency that you define: If you do not use the Payroll application, or if you want to accrue benefits on a different schedule from your payroll schedule, you can determine a separate frequency for benefit accruals. You can initiate the accrual manually on the Benefit Hours Accruals Processing form. Vision calculates the number of benefit hours accrued for an employee by referring to the Benefit Accrual Frequency field on the Timesheets tab of the Accounting Configuration form. This configuration field indicates how often you plan to accrue benefit hours: monthly, semi-monthly, biweekly, or weekly. Vision divides the annual number of benefit hours by the number of times that you plan to accrue benefit hours over the course of the year. If, for example, an employee earns 120 hours of vacation per year and you plan to accrue benefit hours twice a month, Vision divides the 120 hours by 24 and accrues 5 hours each time you process accruals.

  • Process benefit hours automatically for a Regular payroll run: If you select the Accrue benefit hours when payroll is processed option in Accounting Configuration, you can accrue benefit hours each time that a regular payroll run is processed. Vision calculates the number of benefit accrual hours each pay period by dividing the annual number of benefit accrual hours by the number of pay periods in the year. For example, if an employee earns 120 hours of vacation per year and you process payroll twice a month, Vision divides the 120 hours by the 24 pay periods, and accrues 5 hours each pay period.

In both of these cases, the accrual calculation may also be based on the number of hours worked (if the Enable Accruals Based on Hours Worked check box is selected on the Timesheet Tab in Configuration > Accounting > Company Settings). This setting allows you to calculate and run the accrual process based on the number of hours worked.

When you process benefit hours accruals, you always affect the number of hours earned. You do not affect the number of hours taken. When you process benefit hours adjustments, however, you may adjust either benefit hours earned or taken. You must associate accrual codes with all benefit-related projects in Benefit Accrual Setup before you post timesheets or run payroll, to have any associated hours taken reflected on the paycheck, the Payroll Journal, and on the Accrued Time report.

Benefit Hours Accruals Reporting

Use the Accrued Time report to review how much time each employee has earned and taken during the current benefit year.