Holiday calculations in SelectHR are based on the working schedule periods defined within an employee’s assigned working pattern. These periods determine whether time off is recorded in full or half days and vary depending on whether the employee is on a standard shift or a variable hours contract.
Understanding how these schedules work ensures holiday entitlement is recorded and deducted accurately.
Standard shift workers
For standard shift workers (e.g. 9:00am–5:00pm), the working day is typically split into two periods, such as:
09:00–12:00
13:00–17:00
Each period counts as 0.5 days, meaning a full day consists of two periods, totaling 1 whole day. Because of this structure, employees on standard shifts can book half days by selecting one of the two periods to take off.
Variable hours workers
For employees on variable contracts, things work differently. These employees are typically assigned the Variable Work Day working schedule, a special system schedule used to reflect that they may work any number of hours on any given day, or none at all.
This schedule includes a single period:
00:00–23:59
This single period always counts as one full day, meaning that employees assigned to this schedule cannot book half days, as there is no second period to select.
Instead, variable-hour workers should enter the number of hours they intend to take off when booking a holiday. Their manager can then approve or decline the request as needed.
When an employee runs through the absence request workflow, it will ask them to enter the number of hours they wish to take off per day.
Why holidays should be recorded in hours
Because variable-hour workers don’t follow a fixed pattern, it’s best to allocate their holiday entitlement in hours rather than days. This ensures that:
The correct number of hours is deducted from their entitlement when a holiday is taken.
The employee’s holiday allowance and usage are recorded accurately.
If holiday is instead tracked in days, the system defaults to treating any time off as a full day, based solely on the working schedule, which is always set to 1 day. This can lead to incorrect deductions if the employee only takes a few hours off.
🤓 Tip: If you do choose to allocate holiday in days for a variable hours worker, you will need to manually edit each absence record to reflect the correct number of days taken based on how many hours were used.