WFM UK: Planned COVID19 System Updates

Workforce Management System Enhancements

At a time when businesses are preparing to reopen, and figuring out how to manage their employees under the new flexible furlough rules, we wanted to give an update on the system enhancements that are being worked on over the next few months that will make things a little easier for you.

Rotas and Tronc

Many customers have been closed for several weeks and have rotas and tronc funds open within HR & Payroll that will need to be closed. We are looking for the best, most efficient way for rotas and tronc funds to be closed without the requirement to complete each day and each week separately.

More information on this will be published on our Customer Community soon.

Flexible Furlough

Initially, the UK Government announced that the Flexible Furlough scheme would commence from 1st August, 2020. On Friday 29th May, it was then announced that this would be brought forward to July, to allow businesses that were reopening to bring back furloughed employees on a part-time basis without affecting their furlough pay amount.

The ability to bring back furloughed employees on a part-time basis means that Fourth will need to make several changes to HR & PAyroll to help customers to manage this. These changes will include:

• A furlough status indicator within the rota page which can be used to easily identify those employees with an active furlough status
• A change to the Employer Claim Export to recognise ‘worked’ pay during a furlough period and to calculate Employer NIC and minimum pension contributions accordingly
• Further changes to the Employer Claim export to take the change in claim amounts in August, September and October
• A change to the flexible holiday calculation to ensure that part-time work during furlough does not negatively impact holiday accrual or allowance for employees

Statutory Annual Leave

As part of the Coronavirus Act 2020, at was announced that employees who have not taken their Statutory Annual Leave due to Covid-19 will be able to carry it over for the next 2 holiday years. To accommodate this, Fourth will be developing functionality to allow carry-over holidays for employees to be recorded and included in the holiday for the next two years until exhausted.

Additional Information

Further information about each of these enhancements will be added to the Customer Community over the next few weeks and closer to the release date.

With regard to the Employer Claim Export, HMRC will be releasing technical information around 12th June 2020 which will detail the new claim calculations.