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The NZ Holidays Act 2003
The New Zealand Holidays Act 2003 describes certain leave types (such as sick leave) in days, not hours. For companies to be compliant, leave that is described in days in legislation is best managed in days in practice. For example, an employee who works 10-hour days has a sick leave entitlement of 80 hours a year. If they take all of their sick leave in a year, and that leave is managed in hours, they would only receive 8 days instead of the 10 days required by law.
Although the Act describes annual leave in weeks (that is, everyone gets 4 weeks of annual leave a year), when annual leave is taken or cashed out, the employee is paid for the agreed portion of the annual leave entitlement. For employees who work a consistent number of days each week but not a consistent number of hours, days is a better way to manage their annual leave. How else would you realistically manage their entitlement if their worked hours differ each week?
Say an employee works 3 days a week, but their total hours over those three days vary from week to week. For this employee:
3 days per week * 4 weeks AL entitlement per year = 12 days
If you managed this employee’s annual leave in hours, and you gave them, say, 4 weeks of their average hours, that calculation might end up looking more like:
4 weeks * 21 average hours = 84 hours AL entitlement per year
And if that employee always took leave when they were scheduled to work a 36-hour week, they would only be able to take 2.3 weeks of annual leave.
So, in order to avoid the above dumpster fire, we need to give our clients the ability to manage leave in days as well as in hours.