Offering paid time off (PTO) may seem like an easy decision. Doing so can help you stand out to new candidates and retain current employees.

The harder part may surround implementation. Great news: implementing PTO and accrued time waits just a few clicks away with TimeClick.

Types of Paid Time Off

As we jump into the details of setting up TimeClick as a PTO tracker, let’s start off by identifying the two central pillars of PTO.

Accrued Time

This pillar refers to how employees go about earning PTO hours. Industry standards generally opt for 1 of 4 methods: hourly, monthly, annually, and by pay period.

The differences are self-explanatory – your choice of how employees accrue time will determine how an employee accumulates PTO hours.

Hourly accrual generally works for business owners who prefer their employees to stack PTO over time as an additional form of compensation for time worked.

With this method, employers can avoid incentivizing workers who may try to take advantage of the system.

Each of the other methods award employees with flat amounts of PTO hours on a monthly, yearly, or pay period basis. Though simpler to implement than hourly accrual, these methods can introduce some issues.

The problem involves workers who can try to take advantage of longer accrual periods. Take this example.

Joe works for a restaurant who offers annual PTO. He gets hired in December and receives his annual allotment of 40 PTO hours which he promptly uses in the first week of January.

This may not seem like a significant problem until Joe quits after his week off and moves to another position.

The possibility of this scenario often convinces business owners to opt for hourly accrual methods which are made simple with TimeClick.

Types of PTO Hours

This pillar mostly centers on the policies of your business. Some companies operate according to policies that clearly identify different types of PTO with different requirements and accrual rates.

The popular types of PTO include vacation and sick hours, but you may decide to offer parental leave, personal leave, or a myriad of other options.

Many companies decide to lump everything into one category by just offering PTO and letting employees decide how to use them.

Setting up PTO & Accrued Time

Whether you’ve never touched PTO or want to change your current settings, setting up PTO & accrued time is a cinch with TimeClick.

First Time Users

For first time users, you’ll see a window appear once you complete installation. This window will walk you through setting your pay period preferences and creating employees first.

After you do so, the window will ask you for your Accrued Time preferences. This refers to the PTO settings for TimeClick.

Since you will not have any accrued time categories set up, you must select Create a New Category in the first drop-down selector. You will see several options populate from there.

The first drop-down selector allows you to choose your accrued time interval from the following options: Hourly, By Pay Period, Monthly, and Annually.

The Hourly, By Pay Period, and Monthly options offer the same options which require you to input how many PTO hours your employees will earn by the hour, pay period, or the month respectively.

The Annual option allows you a few other options to help you prevent PTO abuse on the part of employees.

As you can see, you can choose to enable or disable the option for resetting employee PTO balances annually. You can allow this to take place on a certain date or on the employee’s hiring date.

Finally, for any of the accrued time intervals, you can set custom names so you can differentiate accrued time hours. For example, you may want to set up different categories for Vacation, Sick, and Personal hours.

Current Users

Since you already have TimeClick set up, you will use the Admin options to set your PTO & Accrued Time preferences. Click on the Admin button at the top right of the main TimeClick screen and enter your Admin password if you have one.

Once the Admin options appear, you will select the Accrued Time option as depicted below.

From there, the rest of the steps will follow the previous section.

Conclusion

The landscape of work continues to change not just in the United States, but across the world. Workers now search for employment with greater standards for compensation than before in response to local and global challenges we continue to face with COVID-19.

We mention this in reference to the changes you are likely to face, if you have not already. If PTO is a newer offering for your business, we at TimeClick look forward to the opportunity to make it and other changes easier and more efficient.

Got a question or a technical issue? Get in touch with our five-star support team by phone at (435), 753-4102, by email at support@timeclick.com, or chat with us.