Accruing Sick and Vacation Time for Employees

QuickBooks has a feature that allows the tracking of sick and/or vacation time for employees.

It’s a simple procedure that, once setup, requires little updating. Let’s create a scenario for our sample company, Rock Castle Construction.

Rock Castle needs to setup their QuickBooks to track sick time for their employees. Presently they do not offer this benefit.

For future payrolls, employees will be eligible for one hour of paid sick time for every thirty hours worked.

We will start by opening the Edit Employee window. From here, we select the Payroll Info tab, and select the Sick/Vacation button. When we do, the following window opens.

The arrows in the screenshot of the Sick and Vacation window point to the two different sections. We’ll be setting up sick time, vacation time works in the same manner.

Note how the window is setup to accomplish Rock Castle’s goal of allowing one hour sick time for every thirty hours worked.

The Hours Available and Hours Used should be zero. If this is the initial setup, the employee has neither used any sick hours nor has any currently available.

We have three choices with the dropdown that currently displays the selection “Every hour on paycheck.” The selections are:

• Beginning of year
• Every Paycheck
• Every hour on paycheck

The “Beginning of the year” selection would make available a specified numbers of hours at the beginning of each year. Those paid hours would be immediately available to the employee.

The “Every paycheck” selection accrues a set number of hours with each paycheck, regardless of how many hours are worked in that pay period.

The final setting is the one Rock Castle will use. Accrue hours (or fractions of an hour) for each hour worked.

The “Hours accrued per hour paid” field shows 0:02:00, or two minutes for each hour worked. This will accrue an hour of paid sick time for every thirty hours worked. Just what we were trying to accomplish.

This field might show as .03333 in your QuickBooks. This is because time can be set to show in either hours:minutes or as a decimal.

Edit->Preferences->General->Company Preferences is where you will find this setting. Either way, it is the same amount of time, just shown in a different format.

In our Sick and Vacation window, we still have a couple of fields to fill out. We can set a maximum number of hours. This will cause the sick to stop accruing once this amount is reached and not used. The accrual will re-start once some of the paid time is used.

There is a checkbox to reset the hours for each year. That is, any unused time at the end of the year would be lost to the employee.

In the example, we have not used this setting. If you consider this option, check on the legality as it is prohibited in some places.

Rock Castle Construction is on a calendar year, so the “Year begins” field is set to January 1.

A date can be set when QuickBooks will begin accruing. This would allow you to do the setup today, yet have it become active at a later date.

Hector Garcia, CPA
Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor
12401 Orange Drive #136
Davie, FL 33330
954-414-1524
hector@garciacpa.com