All employees are entitled to some periods of paid sick leave per year of service. In UAE, employees may take a paid sick leave after three months since the end of their probation period and with total leave of absence not exceeding consecutive or non-consecutive 90 days per year of service.
Generally, the sick pay depends on the sick leave interval and is calculated as follows:
- 100% for the first 15 days.
- 50% for the following 30 days.
- 0% for days from 46th up to 90th.
A company may grant other types (with more favorable conditions) of sick leave to its employees or specific groups of employees.
Sick Leave Types
In FirstBIT ERP, you can define a number of sick leave types as master records. First, you need to create Sick Leave Intervals which are created separately and used to define sick leave types (for detail, refer to Adding a Sick Leave Interval). For example, typical intervals for the base sick leave type in UAE are: 1-15, 16-45, and 46-90. To the list of intervals, you can add all the intervals that will be used for different sick leave types.
Then, you can create all the sick leave types that will be used in you organization by adding intervals, specifying rates for them, and selecting the base earning (accrual) types and calculation methods. The sick leave type should include all the earning types that are used in employment contracts with this sick leave type assigned. For details, refer to Adding a Sick Leave Type.
Sick Leave Calculation
Documents of the Sick Leave type are created when an employee requests a leave of absence due to illness.
For the employee, you need to specify the start and end days of the sick leave. For each new sick leave, the program checks how many sick days were used by this employee (during the employee's current year of service) and calculates which sick leave interval or intervals the new sick leave covers. When you click the Calculate button, the program calculates the sick pay according to the rates associated with sick leave intervals covered by the sick leave.
Example: An employee John takes his first 10-days sick leave in his current year of service. The base salary is 1800 AED with daily salary of 60 AED (resulted from 1800/30).
The sick pay will be:
600=10*60
because the first 15 days are paid fully.
At the moment of the second sick leave, which happened in the same year of service, the employee has 10 days of sick leave used and requested another 8 days of sick leave. This time, the sick pay will be calculated as follows:
5*1*60 + 3*0.5*60 = 390
because the first 5 days are still in the 100%-rate interval, while the next 3 days are in the half-pay interval.
Note. With start of each new year of service of an employee, the number of sick days used by the employee is reset to 0. If a sick leave is taken at the end of the current year of service and extends in the next year, the rates from the current year applied, and the number of used days will be reset to 0 after the sick leave is posted. For example, John takes the third sick leave (starting April 28) at the brink of his next year of employment which starts on May 1st. With 18 days of sick leave used in the current year, his 5 days of illness will be paid at rate of 50%.
The posted Sick Leave documents will reflect the corresponding leave of absence days in Time Sheets if you select to populate the time sheet by using the Fill by all documents option.
Once the Sick Leave document is posted, you can generate a Payroll Sheet for it and then create a payment to the employee by cheque, cash, or bank payment (a deposit to the employee's bank account). To provide the details of calculation to the employee, you can use the following report: HR and Payroll > Reports > Payslip.