Starting July 1st, 2015, a new sick pay leave act goes into effect for California. In order to help our customers comply with the new requirements, we have decided to make some enhancements within our payroll module. Programming is currently in progress and more details will come as options are being implemented.
This information is provided to answer questions about how Datatech programs will help you to handle the new sick pay leave laws. Specific questions about how your business should develop and implement sick pay policy should be directed to your legal counsel.
Here is a list of planned changes:
Plan Set-Up
- Employers will be able to set up multiple sick pay plans with different rates and rules. A sick pay plan will be assigned to each employee who qualifies.
- In the sick pay accrual rules, two different caps will be set. You will set a maximum number of hours to accrue and a maximum number of hours available to be used within a year. Any unused hours accrued will carry over to the next year up to the maximum accrual cap. If an employee has accrued the maximum and takes sick pay, the accrual will resume until it has reached the maximum accrual amount. However, sick pay they are allowed to use is always based on the rule for sick pay allowed within a year. You can accrue beyond the obligatory 6 days/48 hours, as specified in the law.
- In the plan setup you can determine your measurement period based on a calendar year or the plan year you determine in your policy. We are not planning on supporting the option to base the year on the individual employment dates.
- We will have the ability to accrue sick pay by State worked for multi-State employers who have workers who need accruals based on only California wages only. (If you are a multi-state employer and are not sure how multi-state rules affect your company, please consult legal counsel.)
- We will be adding a tool to initially assign a plan to current employees so that you do not need to do this one by one.
Check Stubs
- Sick pay will accrue and appear on check stubs in hour increments as well as the sick pay available to the employee for the year.
Eligibility Periods/Data Entry
- We will have an eligibility date field in the employee file. This will be for the 90 day employment waiting period before sick pay can be taken. It will be the responsibility of the employer to enter this date when the employee is hired or re-hired. A warning will pop up in payroll entry when the sick pay wage type is used prior to the end of that 90 day period. The program will allow an over-ride by the user so you have the ability to advance an employee their accrued sick pay.
- We will not be tracking the 30 day California employment period since the accrual needs to start from day one of employment and the 90 day employment period will cover beyond that 30 days.
- If an employee leaves and returns to work at a later time, it will be up to the user to determine if any prior accrual should remain or if it is past the year period and it needs to be reset. This also applies for the employment waiting period.
Rate of Pay
- For piecework workers who need sick pay paid based on a 90 day average hourly wage, we are planning a simple method for calculating this rate directly from the check entry window.
Lump Sum Method
- For employers using the lump sum method instead of accruing, we will have a method for setting up lump sum sick pay values in the employee files and re-setting these each year. More details will come as we finalize the programming.
It is our hope that the above will answer most, if not all of the questions our customers have. If you have any questions regarding the above options, please e-mail me @ damaris@datatechag.com.
Links for information about the new law:
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Paid_Sick_Leave.htm
https://www.calchamber.com/headlines/pages/12082014-paid-sick-leave-law-a-look-at-employer-compliance-options.aspx
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140AB1522