Everyone hates the word “audit,” but without an audit, you might be giving away more leave than you intended. It’s critical to know exactly how many benefit hours have been used in the past so that you can provide the appropriate leave time benefits to your employees.
**Automatic Knowledge of Available Benefit Hours**
A leave management system is beneficial because it will help you automatically know available benefit hours. Knowing this information prior to the start of any new absence would be extremely helpful, and it’s easily achieved when all past leave data is collected and managed under one roof. Even before the start of the absence, a case can be created for any employee and the system will indicate not only hours worked for determining eligibility, but also average hours worked. Any previous time utilized will also be clearly indicated. If it’s expected that average hours worked will be different prior to the actual start of the leave, then the user can easily interact with their system and accurately adjust and determine how many benefit hours will truly be available.
For FMLA, regardless of which plan year is chosen — Rolling Backward, Rolling Forward, Calendar-year or another Fixed-year length of time — your leave management solution will accurately display available hours, even if a year ago the employee was in the midst of a leave and is currently accruing or being credited with available hours. But don’t stop there, because we know FMLA is not the only benefit available to many employees who also have additional state- and company-protected leave time available. Available balances for all applicable leave types will be readily accessible in a leave management system, like LeaveXpert. Additionally, we know that leave taken is often not continuous but in the form of periodic or intermittent time. These variations in episodic type don’t have to hinder your ability to effectively calculate available benefit hours for any applicable leave types.
**Accurate Maintenance of Current Leave Time Used**
Once leave time has been approved, we know that precisely tracking time taken is essential to providing benefits within allotted hours. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to track all applicable leave types simultaneously? That’s exactly what’s possible with a leave management software solution. Current balances are produced and actively updated for any new leave time taken, and balances are correctly tracked, regardless of whether the applicable leave types may run concurrently or consecutively with one another. Since we know intermittent hours are approved and taken on a periodic basis, that approved number of hours can be designated, observed and easily compared with any weekly intermittent hours actually occurring.
It may seem that the discussion so far has implied management of just one case, but of course we know that multiple cases of leave are being tracked at the same time. In this situation, it’s important to be able to easily identify and determine which cases are approaching leave exhaustion. An appropriate software solution will contain numerous task reminders warning the user of upcoming leave type exhaustion. This way, the user is informed in a timely manner and can understand, prepare and effectively communicate with the employee and the employee’s supervisor of the impending end of leave benefits. And if in the weeks or days prior to leave exhaustion it’s necessary to recertify any leave being taken, any related certification dates — whether sent, due or received — can effortlessly be recorded within the software solution.
For more information on LeaveXpert, contact us!
Audit Leave Use to Stay Within the Balance
