You can configure balances to use a grant amount, which informs employees how much of a balance they will earn during a balance period, often a year. However, this is a separate value from what the employee has earned (or, accrued), used, and has remaining.
For example, the vacation days balance can be configured so that employees are granted 12 days a year and accrue 1 day a month. On the first day of the year, an employee’s grant amount for the vacation balance is 12 days, but because they accrue 1 vacation day at the start of the month, their actual balance is 1 day.
Consider the same scenario after 6 months. The employee’s vacation grant amount is still 12 days. However, they have accrued 6 days. Then, on the 2nd week of June, they take 5 days off, using 5 days of their vacation balance. At this point, the employee has accrued 6, used 5, and has 1 vacation day remaining, but the grant amount is still 12 days.
The grant amount also impacts how many units of the balance the employee can use, irrespective of how many units of that balance the employee has accrued at the time: employees can use up to their granted amount of a balance within a single balance period, even if they haven’t accrued that amount yet.
For example, the employee who has been granted 12 vacation days for the year, and only accrued 6 of them by June 1, could in fact use all 12 granted vacation days in June. If they did, the employee’s vacation balance would have the following amounts: accrued 6, used 12, remaining -6 days, and a grant amount of 12 days.
Dayforce takes into account the amount of a grant based balance an employee has already used when determining how many balances the employee can still use. Employees can use up to their granted amount minus what they have already used.
Continuing the example scenario, if the employee has used 4 vacation days during the balance period (in this case a year), and their grant amount is 12 days, they can only use another 8 vacation days during the year.
Configuring grant based entitlements involves:
- Configuring one (or several) balances to be grant based by selecting the Is Grant Based checkbox during their configuration. See Balance Settings.
- Configuring grant based entitlement rules and assigning them to the entitlement policies linked to the grant based balances. See Entitlements.
- (Optional) Configuring Dayforce to prorate grant amounts.