Kartaya Terrace Leave Tiers Customization – Usage & Configuration Guide

By Silvertrek Systems

Version 1.05

Last updated 6/25/2024

Purpose:

In Vista, the Leave Codes and their associated setup are very powerful for handling many kinds of leave policy. However, there is one feature Vista is missing: The ability to give employees different rates of leave accrual based on their time of service. Enter the Kartaya Terrace Leave Tiers customization. Kartaya Terrace introduces tiers to the Leave Codes setup, and applies the desired rate or limit overrides to employees when they cross time thresholds that define the tiers.

Here is an example of a tier-based accrual rule:

                “Employees who have worked at Company for less than 5 years receive 80 hours of PTO time every year, while employees who have worked for 5 years or more receive 100 hours a year.”

This relatively simple rule is unfortunately not supported out of the box in Vista. Payroll or HR technicians need to manually track all employees’ years of service and override their rates of accrual in PR Employee Leave when they cross a tier threshold. Kartaya Terrace allows specifying many kinds of rule in a tier-based way.

Parts of Kartaya Terrace:

The most prominent parts of Terrace are the custom tab labeled “Leave Tiers” in PR Leave Codes, and the buttons labeled “Apply Leave Tier Rates” in PR Employee Leave and in PR Leave Entry -> File -> Auto Leave Accrual/Usage Init. Also, there are two custom fields: “Disable leave tiers?” in PR Employee Leave, and “Adjusted Leave Start Date” in PR Employees -> Add’l Info tab. Finally, there is a custom report, “+ PR Leave Tier History”.

What do the Terrace buttons do?

When you click the “Apply Leave Tier Rates” button, Terrace adjusts rows in PR Employee Leave to match the accruals/limits set up in the Leave Tiers tab, based on the employee’s duration of employment.

For leave codes that have Tiers set up, the Terrace button “takes control” of the highlighted fields pictured below: Fixed Amount (for fixed accruals), Available Balance Limit, Carryover Limit, Accrual Limit 1, and Accrual Limit 2, along with the Accrual/Usage Overrides tab (for rate-based accruals). Unless the employee hasn’t reached the first tier of service yet, or the “Disable” checkbox is checked on PR Employee Leave, then the Terrace button will overwrite any data in these places and replace it with the calculated amount based on the Leave Tiers setup and the employee’s years of service.

The button can be clicked as often as needed. It will always bring Employee Leave up to date with the leave tiers as of the day you are clicking the button. It’s common among Terrace users to click the button every week at some point during payroll processing, usually before PR Auto Leave Accrual so the Auto Leave Accrual can accrue at the latest rates/limits for each employee.

The button found on PR Employee Leave, labeled “Apply Leave Tier Rate”, runs the Terrace procedure on only a single employee, the employee whose PR Employee Leave you are looking at. It will adjust all of that employee’s leave codes, though, not only the one you are looking at in PR Employee Leave.

The button in PR Leave Entry -> File menu -> Auto Leave Accrual/Usage Init, which is also labeled “Apply Leave Tier Rates”, runs Terrace on all employees in the PR Company.

Terrace will only adjust leave for leave codes marked Active in PR Leave Codes. Terrace will only adjust leave for Employee & Leave Code combinations that are marked Active in PR Employee Leave, and also will skip Employee & Leave Code combinations that have the “Disable Leave Tier?” checkbox checked in PR Employee Leave. Further, the button will only adjust employees who are Active in PR Employees.

Importantly, Terrace will only change existing PR Employee Leave rows, it will not create new ones. Thus, if you want some employees to get a certain leave code’s tiers, you must assign that leave code to them in PR Employee Leave. Also, if you don’t want an employee to get a leave code, just don’t add it to them in PR Employee Leave.

What are Leave Tiers?

Leave Tiers are different levels of leave given to employees who have worked for different lengths of time. The leave tiers are set up in a custom tab in PR Leave Codes: the Leave Tiers tab.

Explanation of each column in the Leave Tiers tab:

• Leave Tier:
  1. This is purely a number that the system uses to track which tier is which, it does not have any effect on the order of applying leave tiers. The order of the tiers is determined entirely by the Threshold Years/Months columns. Typically, to reduce confusion, users of Terrace will order their tiers in order of increasing time of service, but this is not required.
  2. This field is a “key field” that identifies the row, so it can’t be left blank or be the same as any other, and can’t be edited after the fact; to rearrange tiers you might need to delete and re-add rows. To get a new tier, you can type ‘N’ in the Leave Tier column and it will start a new row.
• Threshold Years (AKA Completed Years of Service):
  1. This (together with Threshold Months) is the threshold after which the tier comes into effect. It refers to completed years of service before applying a tier, so the earliest possible tier begins at 0 years when employees are hired. A threshold of 1 year happens after the employee reaches 1 full year of service. See also the “Apply On” column for more control over when the tier comes into effect.
  2. You may leave the Threshold Years blank, it will behave the same as if you entered 0 years.
  3. Combined with the Threshold Months column, together these determine when is the threshold for this leave tier. Terrace multiplies the Years by 12 and adds the Months to get the combined threshold time in months.
• Threshold Months (AKA Completed Months of Service):
  1. This (together with Threshold Years) controls the threshold for when this leave tier applies. It refers to completed months of service before applying a tier, so the earliest possible tier begins at 0 months when employees are hired. A threshold of 1 month happens after the employee reaches 1 full month of service. See also the “Apply On” column for more control over when the tier comes into effect.
  2. You may leave the Threshold Months blank, it will behave the same as if you entered 0 months.
  3. Combined with the Threshold Years column, together these determine when is the threshold for this leave tier. Terrace multiplies the Years by 12 and adds the Months to get the combined threshold time in months.
• Apply On:
  1. Apply On is a required choice from a list of options: D-Day of threshold (default), M-Month of threshold, Q-Quarter of threshold, and Y-Year of threshold. These control when, in relation to the employee reaching a threshold of employment, the tier begins to apply. The most natural is Day of, which means the day the employee reaches a threshold is the same as the day it begins to apply. The other tiers are the first day in the given unit that has the threshold: Month of is the first of the month that contains the threshold, Quarter of is the first day of the quarter, and Year of is the beginning of the year in which the employee will reach the threshold.
  2. For example, say an employee was hired on 6/15/2023 and there is a tier for 1 year of service. If that tier’s Apply On is set to D-Day of, then anytime the button is clicked after 6/15/2024, the employee’s leave will be adjusted to that tier’s amount. If the tier’s Apply On is set to M-Month of, then this will happen if the button is clicked anytime after 6/1/2024. If it is Q-Quarter of, then it will start to apply on 4/1/2024, the quarter beginning date. And if it is set to Y-Year of, the adjustment will happen if the button is clicked starting on 1/1/2024.
  3. The Apply On selection can only make a tier transition happen sooner than it would if it were always the day of (or it can have no effect). If your rules say an employee should get a higher tier starting on the first day of the month following e.g. 6 months of service, you can achieve this by making the tier happen at 7 months and choosing an Apply On of ‘Month of threshold’.
• Rate or Amt Override:
  1. The value in this field replaces the Rate or Amount in PR Employee Leave when the tier is applied to an employee. For fixed accrual Leave Codes, this replaces the Fixed Amount. For rate-based accruals, this replaces the amounts for all Accrual-type rows in the Accrual/Usage Overrides tab of PR Employee Leave. Note any missing Accrual-type rows in Accrual/Usage Overrides will be added by the button, and any existing rows will be adjusted to the new Rate.
• Available Balance Override:
  1. The value in this field replaces the Available Balance override in PR Employee Leave when the tier is applied to an employee.
• Carryover Limit Override:
  1. The value in this field replaces the Carryover Limit override in PR Employee Leave when the tier is applied to an employee.
• Limit 1 Override:
  1. The value in this field replaces the Limit 1 override in PR Employee Leave when the tier is applied to an employee.
• Limit 2 Override:
  1. The value in this field replaces the Limit 2 override in PR Employee Leave when the tier is applied to an employee.
• Apply to EEs:
  1. The Apply To EEs is an optional choice between a list of options: A-All Employees (default), 1-Q1 Employees, 2-Q2 Employees, 3-Q3 Employees, and 4-Q4 Employees. If anything but All Employees is selected here, the rule will be filtered to only apply to employees whose leave start date falls in the selected quarter.
  2. For example, if a rule is entered with Apply To EEs chosen as Q1 Employees, any employees who were hired/rehired in Q1 (or have an Adjusted Leave Start Date set in PR Employees that falls in Q1) will be adjusted by the rule, but all other employees will be skipped.
  3. You may leave the Apply to EEs blank, it will behave the same as if you selected All Employees.

How does Terrace know how long an employee has been employed?

The Terrace customization uses the following list of dates to determine an employee’s length of service as of the day you are clicking the button:

• If you have entered a date into the custom “Adjusted Leave Start Date” on the PR Employees -> Add’l Info tab, Terrace will use that date as the start of service.
• Otherwise, Terrace will use the most recent of the Hire Date and the Recent Rehire Date in PR Employees.

A Setup and Usage Example

Here is an example leave tier setup to show some of the features. First, the Leave Tiers are entered in PR Leave Codes for the PTO leave code. Note you can choose different “Apply On” for different rules.

The button on PR Employee Leave can be clicked for just a single employee:

Here is an example with a rule that differs based on the quarter the employees were hired. This is done by setting up 4 separate tiers, each of which is filtered to employees of a single quarter, and then also some tiers that don’t have the quarter filter, so those tiers will apply to any of the employees.

Leave Tier History report

The customization comes with a history tracking feature. When the button is clicked, the Terrace button will record the before and after of any rate changes the button makes. Note, it only tracks changes made by the button, not any intervening changes made by hand to the PR Employee Leave. These history rows can be viewed by running the “+ PR Leave Tier History” report.

The below report screenshot shows what a row looks like on the report when the button is clicked but no employees are changed.

Below is the dialog box you see when clicking the button and no employee leave accruals need to change:

The button to run for all employees is found in PR Leave Entry -> File menu -> Leave Accrual/Usage Init.

The button, labeled “Apply Leave Tier Rates”, is located near the bottom of the form. In this screenshot, the button was pressed and adjusted Fixed accruals for 23 employees.

After clicking the button, the Leave Tier History report now shows the detail of all the employees who were adjusted by the button, showing their old rate and new rate.

A Rate-Based accrual example

When rate-based leave code changes happen, the message looks slightly different:

Here is an example Leave Tier for a Rate-Based accrual Leave Code. The result of clicking the button is the PR Employee Leave -> Accrual/Usage Overrides tab now contains one Accrual row for each Earn Code that exists in the Leave Code’s Accrual/Usage Info tab. The Accrual rows in PR Employee Leave on the Overrides tab all have the Rate set up in the Rate or Amount Override field of the Leave Tier.