This guide will cover how you will receive your Long Service Leave entitlements, how and when you can use them, and how they will be paid.
What this help guide covers:
This article refers to the feature Long Service Leave (calculated), which is only available for customers using Tanda Payroll.
Receiving LSL
Entitlements & Available Balances
An employee will receive their available balance only upon being eligible for it. Once an employee has reached their entitlement, if they are in QLD or WA, they should see the amount they’ve been assigned in the payslip that spans their employment anniversary. For employees in NSW, VIC or SA, they'll see their balance update in the mobile app when they reach their entitlement.
The balances will also be updated in the Long Service Leave tab in their profiles.
For staff to see their available balances, ensure that the Leave Type setting 'Hide Leave Balance from employee for this leave type' is unticked.
Staff that are not eligible for Long Service Leave in their state will not have a Long Service Leave balance, but they can still have their LSL liability tracked by setting up the Long Service Leave tab in their profile and running the Long Service Leave Liability report.
Prorated Balances
Prorated balances will not show on payslips each pay run, like you might expect from a regularly accruing leave type and other versions of LSL. The prorated balances and liabilities for Long Service Leave will instead update in the background as the employee's employment tenure increases.
Once the employee reaches their next entitlement date and receives their available balance, the prorated balance is set to 0 before starting to increase again.
The prorated balances are visible both directly on employee profiles and in the Long Service Leave Liability report. You can select specific pay periods in the LSL Liability report to see a staff member's prorated balance at certain points in time.
Using Long Service Leave
Checking balances
Staff are able to see their Long Service Leave (calculated) balances with the rest of their leave in the mobile app, but they will only be able to view their Available/Current balances. This is leave that employees are actually eligible to take, and does not include any prorated balances.
Balance in app:
Balances in profile:
Employees in NSW, VIC or SA will see their balance in weeks, and employees in QLD or WA will see their balance as a number of hours. Read more about this difference in Long Service Leave Explained.
Creating Leave Requests
Weeks
When taking LSL in NSW, VIC or SA, you'll be taking it as a number of weeks. For these states, you'll enter the start and end dates of when you want to take off, including days that you normally would have off.
The way the system determines how many weeks to use when requesting leaving is by taking the number of hours in the request, divided by the normal weekly hours for the employee. Because of this, to edit the number of weeks being used in the request, edit the daily breakdown and adjust the number of hours.
Fixed Hours Employees (Weeks)
If you work set hours, the system will recognise this and will determine how much leave to use from your Contracted Weekly Hours and the number of hours in the leave request.
The request will autofill the hours from an employee's Regular Hours of Work in the pay conditions where possible.
The number of hours in the leave request will be counted and divided by the Contracted Weekly Hours set in your pay conditions.
For example:
Take an employee who has Regular Hours of Work on 4 days a week: 7.5 hours on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
The Contracted Weekly Hours have been set to 30 to reflect this.
Leave Autofill has been set up to fill leave requests from Regular Hours of Work.
Creating a leave request that spans from Monday-Sunday will use 1 week of LSL. A leave request that spans from Monday-Thursday will also use 1 week of LSL. This is because the request contains the same number of hours for both, covering all worked hours in the week ((hours in leave request: 4*7.5) / 30 contracted weekly hours).
A leave request that spans from Sunday-Tuesday will use 0.5 weeks of LSL. This is because the request spans half of the working hours in a week ((2 *7.5)/30).
Fluctuating Hours Employees (Weeks)
For employees that do not have Regular Hours of Work and have fluctuating hours, the calculation is slightly different for part-week requests.
If you're using a mutual agreement clause and taking only a few days of LSL off, there is an averaging calculation to determine how many days a week you normally work, and how many hours you normally work in a week. This is used to determine what portion of a week should be deducted from your balance.
The start/end of a week is determined by the days of the Pay Period in your account.
See below for a specific breakdown of how leave requests will work for these staff:
The average number of days worked per week is found using timesheets. The average number of ordinary hours worked per week is also found using timesheets.
These two figures determine how many hours per day you normally work (average number of hours/average number of days).
When you request leave for a number of days less than or equal to your average number of days worked per week, the average daily hours is assigned to each day you take off. This determines how much of the normal week is taken off by dividing the number of hours in the request by the total average number of hours worked.
When you request leave for more days than your average number of days worked per week (but not more than a full week), this is counted as a full week taken, and your average number of hours per week is averaged over the number of days taken.
When you request leave for more than a week, the number of full weeks taken is found, and the remaining number of days is converted into weeks using the logic in points 3 & 4.
For example:
Take an employee who works on average 4 days a week, and their average weekly hours is calculated as 24. The pay period in the account runs from Monday to Sunday.
The average daily hours is therefore 6 hours (24 average hours / 4 average days).
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If this employee requested 2 days off in the week (Monday & Tuesday), each day would be prefilled with 6 hours.
The total hours in the leave request would be 12 hours, which would result in 0.5 weeks being used. The employee would be paid 50% of their average weekly rate for this request, and their LSL balance would reduce by 0.5 weeks.
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If this employee requested 5 days off in the week (Monday-Friday), this is seen as a full week (since it surpasses the average number of days worked per week), and each day would be prefilled with 4.8 hours (24/5).
This would use 1 week of leave, and they would be paid their full average weekly rate for this request.
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If this employee requested 1 week and 3 days off (Monday until the following Wednesday), the request would use 1.75 weeks of leave.
The breakdown would be as follows:
The first week (Monday-Sunday) would receive 3.43 hours per day (24 hours/7 days), and be counted as 1 full week used.
The remaining 3 days would follow the same logic as the 2-day request above. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday would be assigned 6 hours each, resulting in 18 hours for that week. 18/24 = 0.75 weeks. The first full week plus the three days would equal 1.75 weeks of LSL used.
This calculation should be considered when entering LSL leave requests for staff without Regular Hours.
Hours
For QLD and WA, taking LSL is like taking any other leave type. Enter the number of hours you want to take, and it will be paid out at your hourly rate. You can only use your Available Balance to take LSL.
Paying Long Service Leave
How is the Pay Rate calculated?
A more detailed breakdown of how pay rates are calculated can be found in Configuring Long Service Leave (calculated).
Weeks-based
For weeks-based states, the number of weeks in the request is paid at the Average Weekly Rate specified in the Long Service Leave tab on the employee's profile.
Hours-based
For Hours-based states, the number of hours in the request is multiplied by the hourly rate in the employee's Pay Conditions. If the employee is Salaried, the Salary is converted into an hourly rate.
LSL Termination Payments
Termination Payments for the leave type Long Service Leave (calculated) are not automated in payroll at this point.
If the employee has been terminated and requires their LSL to be paid out, this needs to be manually entered on the payslip.
FAQs
Why can't I see my LSL Balance?
Why can't I see my LSL Balance?
There are a few reasons you might not be able to see your LSL balance in the app. Check the following:
Make sure the Long Service Leave (calculated) leave type settings 'Hide leave balance from employees for this leave type' and 'Prevent leave requests for this leave type' are unticked. These may have been turned on previously to make sure it wasn't accidentally used.
Check that there is an Available balance in the employee's profile. You can check this in the Payroll Details or Long Service Leave tabs. Prorated balances won't be available to take.