Holiday pay

Feb

2025

Time is money – or, manage employees’ working hours more efficiently

With continued economic uncertainty and ballooning employer’s national insurance contributions on the horizon, many UK businesses have tough times ahead. So it’s more important than ever that you are managing employees’ working hours and pay accurately and efficiently.

This means making the most of the latest low-cost technology to track staff attendance and calculate timesheets, saving valuable time and reducing the risk of overspends. When margins are tight, rota software that allows you to schedule staff according to your budget can also help keep your operation in the black.

These are some of our customers’ favourite easyLog products for streamlining staff attendance and scheduling and lowering costs.

Low-cost staff attendance recording

Our Location Clock QR code clocking app is quick and easy to set up and keeps capital outlay to a minimum because it uses employees’ own smartphones as attendance recording devices. Despite being simple to use, the Location Clock app is very reliable – clockings are backed-up by geolocation coordinates and other in-built security features so attendance is recorded accurately, even if an employee tampers with the clock on their phone. There are no up front costs, just a small monthly charge based on the number of app users. This covers installation, easyLog software and support too.

We also offer a simple web-based attendance recording option, which enables sub-contractors and temporary workers to clock in securely with no pre-registration required. And our Clock with ID solution allows staff to clock in and out via a PIN or drop-down menu on an ordinary tablet, turning it into a fixed or portable attendance monitoring device at minimal cost.

Fraudproof biometric clocking at an affordable price

There are some employers who want the reassurance that only a biometric attendance recording option can provide – but understandably don’t relish the initial outlay and ongoing costs that a dedicated terminal involve. For them we have developed the Geo Clock with Photo app, which turns an everyday tablet into a fraudproof biometric clocking device that confirms identity via a stored photographic image, as well as date, time and location – all for a low monthly fee. This is an ideal low-cost option where correct identification is essential for site safety or if workers are determined to beat the system.

Streamline staff allocation with professional rota software

easyLog attendance recording apps are designed to work seamlessly with our rota software to make calculating pay fast and accurate. Unlike a paper or spreadsheet-based system, our professional rota management software has lots of time and money saving options, such as the ability to allocate staff according to a budget and allowing them to view their hours and submit expense and holiday requests via an app on their phone.

Other efficiency features include accurate management of flexible and minimum hours and multiple pay rates, as well as simple recording of sickness, holiday and other absences so calculating the correct rate of pay is quick and easy.

Find the most efficient staff management option for your business

If you have any questions about finding the right easyLog app for your employees, talk to one of our team on 01892 834406 or request a callback using the form on this page.

May

2024

Flexible reports for easier timesheet management

When you’re choosing a staff attendance system it’s easy to focus more attention on the employee-facing technology than what’s going on under the bonnet of the supporting software. But at easyLog we put a great deal of thought and effort into ensuring the behind-the-scenes features of our attendance products are as practical, simple to use and efficient as the clocking function.

Take reports, for instance. We have fine-tuned the report options to enable customers to view the data they need in ways that will help make managing timesheets, costings and pay more accurate and efficient than before. This is a taste of what you can expect.

Flexibility is the key

Being able to handle attendance data in the way that suits your particular organisation, staff and way of working is essential for effective management – so we have made the way reports are created and viewed as flexible as possible.

For instance, you can select data:

By site
By client
By department
By grade
By employee
By work group
And individually, or by a range, or by all

How you choose to format the report is equally flexible:

Timesheets can be rounded however you like – for example, to the nearest 15 minutes, or five minutes, and so on
Deduct unpaid breaks by definable rules
You can also view summaries and averages

Control of your costs

The “Costed” report option is another useful feature that is popular with customers, particularly those that employ sub-contractors such as construction companies. This report allows the user to define a pay rate per hour per person and then automatically add up a costed timesheet – handy for comparing against contractors’ invoices and keeping control of your costs.

The clever reports you don’t usually get

Feeback from customers shows that they appreciate the range of reports on offer. One they particularly like is the “Between first and last clockings” report. This shows the hours between the first and last clocking of the day and so gives a total timesheet for the hours on shift, without all the detail in between – which, of course, they can also see if they want. This is especially useful where workers start and end their day from one location – for example, going to an office to pick up a van and then returning it later that day.

Another report just lists who has clocked in on any selected day. And then there is the “Clients not visited” report, which enables you to check on clients or sites that have not been attended over a defined period.

Keep your accountant happy

Data reports need to be shareable with relevant parties, not least your accountancy software. So we have a range of export options, including Excel, Word, PDF and CSV, so you can make the most of the data.

Find out more

If you have any questions about our attendance solutions and reports, talk to one of our team on 01892 834406 or request a callback using the form on this page.

Jul

2019

Manage holiday cover without losing your cool this summer

For most of us, summer is about sunshine, days out and getting away from it all for a week or two. But for employers it means more gaps in the rota to be filled and fewer staff willing and able to cover, plus additional complications when it comes to calculating pay. This is especially true of smaller employers and those in seasonal trades, who often find the holiday season the most stressful and exhausting time of the year.

Of course, scheduling software cannot take all the pressure out of summer staffing issues but chosen and used appropriately it can make life much simpler.

Dealing with the staff rota

The most pressing matter at holiday time has got to be ensuring you have enough people available at all times to keep your operation running smoothly. This is particularly challenging if your staffing requirements are variable at the best of times. But suitable rota software can really help – not only by alerting managers to potential gaps in the rota and providing suggestions for filling them but also allowing adjustments to be made quickly and easy, until the last minute if required.

easyLog rota software has in-built and optional features that take a lot of the stress out of managing holiday absences, no matter how complex your staffing levels. These include automatically checking that the necessary cover is available to meet your pre-defined staffing profile as soon as a leave request is submitted. Employees can also check their leave status and submit holiday requests directly to the software via their smartphones, freeing up admin time spent handling enquiries.

Calculating holiday pay

It is not just the rota that gets complicated in the holiday season – working out correct pay rates can cause a bit of a headache too. Among the issues you may need to take into account when calculating holiday pay are:

Staff who work variable roles, rates and/or shifts
Adjustments for overnights
Bank Holiday rates
Regular overtime – compulsory and voluntary
Routine out of hours work and on call shifts

easylog software can manage multiple pay rates, so calculating the correct rate of pay is simple. A Shift Analysis report, for example, automatically calculates an employee’s average pay per hour across any period. This can be used to determine the average hourly rate of the hours worked by casual and bank staff, for instance, and so the applicable pay rate for when they are on leave.

Managing leave requests

At this time of year, leave requests tend to come in thick and fast, often at short notice. And so time spent dealing with them also increases.

easylog rota software has a detailed holiday report that shows at a glance how much leave staff have already taken and what they have remaining. This is displayed in simple percentage terms, with a large negative percentage indicating they have a lot of holiday entitlement still to take and vice versa.

Employees can also use our rota app to check their holiday entitlement and book time off direct from their phones. The request goes directly to the main easylog rota software so admins can see at a glance if there will be cover available.

For more information on our rota and payroll reporting software and smartphone apps, please contact us or request a callback.

Sep

2017

easyLog could have flown in to avoid Ryanair rota disaster

It has been a very public and ultimately expensive PR disaster for Ryanair over the last few days. And the fall out seems certain to continue for a few weeks yet. Social media is already awash with stories of angry customers left stranded by cancellations at short notice, ruined wedding weekends, football fans missing their team’s matches and, of course, much talk of compensation claims.

Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has blamed the cancellation of around 50 flights a day over a six week period to a rota mistake that allowed too many pilots holiday leave at the same time. Now we know Ryanair is not an easyLog customer but Mr O’Leary’s blushes (now that’s a condition you don’t often associate with the confrontational airline chief) would have been spared if his company had adopted our staff scheduling software.

Rota software helps ensure adequate holiday cover is in place

Two key features provide assurance to easyLog users that adequate coverage is in place at the point of staff requesting holiday leave. First, a staff coverage profile defined by the user automatically checks that the required headcount is still available if the leave is granted. Second, a detailed holiday report displays in simple percentage terms where each employee stands in relation to their annual holiday entitlement at any time: a large negative percentage reveals they have a lot of holiday still to take while the reverse shows they are ahead of their pro-rata allowance for the year.

Peace of mind for busy employers

Although you may not be running a large airline, we’re sure that having the peace of mind that you have adequate staff coverage during holiday periods and prompt reminders if employees are not taking their holiday entitlement is important for your business.

If you’d like to understand a little more about how easyLog’s staff scheduling software could help with holiday and general absenteeism, calculating your pay analysis and monitoring your employees’ timekeeping, please call us on 01892 834406, request a callback or send us an e-mail. It would be good to have a chat Mr O’Leary..!

Oct

2016

Clocks going back – will your software pay your night staff correctly?

That’s an interesting point given that British Summertime officially ends this Sunday at 2am with the clocks going back by one hour.

So if you pay night staff by the hour will you be paying one hour more for anyone working the night shift starting this Saturday? And correspondingly of course do you pay one less hour when the clocks go forward in March and British Summertime starts?

Some organisations appear to rely on the supposition that an employee working on the night shift when Summertime ends will also be working on the night shift when Summertime starts and therefore a natural order and balance to these things exists. But that is rather wishful thinking to my mind. Across those two days within any year an employee could be on a different shift, be off sick, have left or be on holiday. And if they’re on holiday and you pay that by the hour then what calculation do you use then to ensure the correct remuneration?

Surprisingly I find some organisations blissfully unaware of the point I am making; and when I bring it to their attention there seems to be an immediate fallback position of the ‘natural balance’ rule I mentioned earlier!

Aware of this conundrum or not, it really doesn’t matter if you are an easyLog customer using our staff scheduling software as you can resolve the issue either way. A simple tick box parameter allows you to specify if you wish to pay to the exact hours worked or to the normal scheduled shift. And that will take care of any holiday hours calculations and payments as well.

If you are a current customer that would like some help with implementing this feature please call our support desk on 0333 343 1004. If you don’t currently use our scheduling software but this article has got you interested in exploring what other clever and efficient things it could do for your organisation then call us on 01892 834406 and speak to one of our team.

Jun

2016

Mike Ashley’s Parliamentary embarrassment – easyLog to the rescue!

When Sports Direct’s boss Mike Ashley was recently grilled for three hours by MPs about his company’s employment practices, it emerged that staff were automatically (and “unfairly”) deducted fifteen minutes of pay if they were even a minute late. More crucially, Ashley also had to admit that some employees at his Shirebrook warehouse were, in effect, being paid less than the statutory minimum wage.

Forgive a little smugness on easyLog’s behalf when we read reports of Mike Ashley’s embarrassment in front of the Parliamentary committee. But had Sports Direct been using easyLog’s +S staff scheduling software, these errant practices would have been prevented by some standard features in our rota module. For example, a Shift Analysis report automatically calculates the average pay per hour of any employee across any period, which would have highlighted the shortfall on payment of the Minimum Wage rate. Many easyLog clients also use this report to remunerate holiday accrued payments correctly to their casual and bank staff based on the average hourly rate of the hours worked at the applicable pay rate on the days they worked.

Additionally, our +S software allows lateness to be handled with practicality and a degree of subtlety perhaps unfamiliar to Sports Direct management. Any incident of lateness is highlighted in an Authorisation screen allowing a manager to decide on a case-by-case basis if an individual employee should be penalised and, if so, by how many minutes.

Unlike Mike Ashley, we’re sure that you’re not planning to have to answer to a Parliamentary committee about your employment practices. But having the peace of mind that your staff are being paid for their work and holiday leave correctly, and that this is being achieved with a minimum of manual intervention, are surely important issues for your business. If you’d like to understand a little more about how easyLog’s staff scheduling software could help with calculating your pay analysis and monitoring your employees’ timekeeping, please call us on 01892 834406, request a callback or send us an e-mail. Mike Ashley we await your call…!

Phone us now on 01892 834406 or request a callback