How to Manage Full-time & Part-time Employees on Excel
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Managing employee leave can be a complicated task, especially when juggling the different needs and entitlements of full-time and part-time employees. After all, prorating vacation days isn’t rocket science. However, the underlying math sure can be a challenge, leaving many HRs unsure of where to start.
Here’s the good news: Excel can help you manage employee leave like a boss. Separate tables for full-time and part-time employees make tracking their entitlements a breeze. That’s right — no more sticky notes, no more mental gymnastics. Just a simple, straightforward system that keeps everything organized and easily accessible.
So go ahead, take a deep breath, and let Excel be your trusty sidekick in the wild world of employee leave management. Your head (and your employees) will thank you. In this article, we’ll discuss the key differences between tracking vacations for full-time and part-time employees, as well as some tips on how to do it all on our free Excel Leave Tracking Spreadsheet.
Things to consider before tracking PTO
Calculating different leave quota amounts
The first major difference between tracking vacations for full-time and part-time employees lies in their leave quota amounts. Calculating different leave quota amounts is an essential task when tracking employee vacation days, sick days, or overall PTO. Leave quota amounts are crucial because they determine how many days each employee can take off work, and they differ for full-time and part-time employees. Full-time employees typically have a higher quota amount because they work more hours per week than part-time employees. It is essential to determine the quota amount for each employee accurately, as it ensures that all employees are treated fairly and receive the appropriate amount of vacation days.
To calculate the quota amount for part-time employees, employers must first determine the percentage of hours worked by the employee compared to a full-time employee. For example, if a full-time employee works an 8-hour day, five days a week, their total work hours per week would be 40 hours. If a part-time employee works only two days a week, their work hours per week would be 16 hours. This means a part-time employee works 40% of the full-time employee’s hours.
Once the percentage of working hours is determined, the employer can calculate the quota amount by multiplying the percentage by the original full-time quota amount. For example, if the full-time quota amount is 15 days of vacation, the part-time employee’s vacation quota would be 6 days (40% of 15 days).
It’s important to note that calculating leave quota amounts for part-time employees can be more complex than for full-time employees. This is because part-time employees may work different hours each week, and their leave quotas may change accordingly. You need to ensure that HR accurately calculates the quota amount for each part-time employee based on their specific work schedule.
Keeping track of requested vacation days
The next challenge when tracking vacations for part-time employees is accurately counting the number of requested vacation days. For full-time employees, this is a straightforward process, but it can be more complex for part-time employees who don’t work every day of the week.
To overcome this hurdle, you can use our Excel Leave Template to color in gray the days that your part-time employee does not work. By doing this, you can easily count the number of white squares within the requested vacation dates, giving you an accurate tally of the days being requested. This method eliminates the possibility of errors and ensures that you don’t allow more or fewer days than each employee is entitled to.
Ensuring PTO accrual rates are followed
Employees may receive PTO based on their business’s internal leave policy, which can be determined by the number of hours, weeks, or months they have worked. For instance, PTO may be accrued through the accrual method, which involves earning a specific number of hours, days, or months worked to gain Y hours of time off after reaching X hours (or X days, weeks, etc.). Business owners can select one of six common options to establish a new PTO accrual policy. They can choose between:
- accruing PTO hours each pay period, week, or month
- or resetting PTO accrual by the calendar or fiscal year,
- or using each employee’s work anniversary to determine PTO accrual.
To determine each employee’s entitled number of days or hours, HR teams must manually calculate based on their work history and rollover hours from the previous year, regardless of the approach you use. As a result, it is crucial to keep this in mind when managing PTO for employees using Excel. This is a rather complex issue to solve manually, so keep an eye out for a detailed article explaining how to track Accruals better soon!
How To Manage Full-time & Part-time Employees on Excel
Assuming you have already downloaded our Free Excel Leave Tracking Spreadsheet, here’s what you can do to start tracking Full-time and Part-time employees on it.
Step 1: Create a Table for Full-time Employees
The first step is to create a table to track your full-time employees’ hours and payroll. Here, we’re starting with our Excel Leave Tracking Spreadsheet, but you can use any sheet you’re comfortable with. You can then enter the names of your full-time employees in the first column and then any other PTO data you want to track in the subsequent columns.
We have also created a Payroll column to merge that data with our PTO.
Step 2: Create a Table for Part-time Employees
Now, repeat step 2 — but this time create a table to track your part-time employees’ days worked each week, along with their leave quotas. You can do this on a separate sheet, or on the below your full-time employees on the same sheet to ensure it’s accessible to everyone.
We also created a Yearly Totals sheet to better track their leave quotas for the year.
Step 3: Record PTO Information
Once you have created your tables, you can begin managing PTO for each employee. You can do this by logging each leave type using the key attached, blacking out the days off they’re taking, and logging it into the Yearly Totals sheet.
For example, let’s say Michelle is on vacation leave from March 2 to March 4. We will log this leave in the March sheet and deduct 3 days from her vacation totals in the Yearly Totals sheet.
Step 4: Calculate Payroll
Next, you can use Excel formulas to calculate each employee’s total pay based on the number of hours worked and their hourly rate. For example, you can use the formula “=SUM(B2*C2)” to calculate the total pay for employee 1 in the full-time employee table.
Once you have calculated the days taken off for each employee, you can review the payroll to ensure it is accurate and integrated with your employee’s PTO activities. To ensure timely payment of employee salaries and accurate reflection of their PTO activities, you must actively review and approve payroll. This crucial step involves scrutinizing the payroll calculations, making necessary adjustments, and ensuring an accurate representation of relevant PTO activities, such as vacation days taken or sick leave.
Step 5: Maintain your Progress
Here comes the hardest part!
It is essential to save and archive your Excel workbook after each payroll period. This will allow you to refer to it in case of any disputes or questions about an employee’s pay. To maintain your progress effectively, you should regularly review your PTO and payroll tracking system and make necessary adjustments or updates. This can involve updating PTO policies to reflect changes in the law or company policies, ensuring that payroll calculations are accurate and up to date, and providing training to employees and managers to ensure they understand your PTO tracking system and its policies.
How does Vacation Tracker do it better?
Needless to say, managing PTO for both full-time and part-time employees can be a complex task. However, with a powerful tool such as Vacation Tracker at your disposal, you can easily simplify the process. Curious to see what we mean? Keep reading to learn more!
Administrators in Vacation Tracker can easily configure all settings to automatically manage and track PTO for all employees, whether they are full-time or part-time. Each user gets their own Profile where all PTO information is displayed. This includes leave types, rollover days, accrued PTO, used days, and more. This information is important to map out since it’s useful for future leave requests and to keep track of important organizational culture issues to recognize burnout, overworked employees, etc.
For starters, you can add employee start and end dates in Vacation Tracker for those working on a seasonal or contractual basis at your company. This ensures you’re properly tracking data for the time they remain employed with you.
In addition to that, you can create custom working days for employees on different schedules.
You can also modify individual users’ leave quotas based on their employment (such as prorating for the initial year based on the user’s start date) and automatically accrue their PTO on a monthly, semi-monthly, or bi-weekly basis, all while setting up their individual PTO quotas as well.
No more manual calculations — all you have to do is sit back and let us automate your entire leave management process for you. Name something better, we’ll wait! I hope our tips helped make tracking leaves in your organization even easier. If you have any additional questions about automating your workflow, please let us know at hello@vacationtracker.io — we’re always here to help.
Snigdha Gupta
An avid writer and aspiring marketer, Snigdha is a student at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business.
