The admin that eats a Sunday evening
Rotas, holiday, timesheets and staff paperwork. This is the section aimed squarely at the person who employs four people and does the payroll themselves at the kitchen table, because every product built for this problem is priced per employee per month and assumes you have an HR department.
There is nothing to subscribe to here and no per-user fee. Build the rota, print it, done.
Holiday, which is harder than it looks
Full-time holiday is easy. Everything else is not:
- Part-timers.
- Mid-year starters, and mid-year leavers.
- Term-time only staff.
- Anyone on irregular or zero hours, where entitlement accrues at 12.07 per cent of hours worked rather than as a fixed number of days.
Then holiday pay itself, which for anyone with variable pay has to be averaged over a 52 week reference period, skipping any week they were not paid and going back further to make up the count. That rule is the one most small employers have never heard of, and getting it wrong quietly underpays people for years.
That averaging is a procedure rather than a single sum, and every step of it is one somebody skips:
- Take the 52 weeks before the holiday starts.
- Throw out any week they were not paid at all. A week of nil pay does not count as a zero, it comes out of the sample entirely, which is the step that gets missed and the one that drags the average down when it is missed.
- Go further back to replace each week you threw out, until you have 52 paid weeks or you reach 104 weeks back, whichever comes first.
- If there are fewer than 52 paid weeks in that whole window, average what you actually have.
Leavers are the other trap: untaken days owed in the final payslip, or days overtaken that you may or may not be able to recover depending on what the contract says.
Hours, and the rules around them
Timesheets that total properly including shifts running past midnight. Minutes into decimal hours for payroll, because seven hours thirty eight minutes is 7.63 and not 7.38. Overtime at time and a half or double time. Full-time equivalents for a team of part-timers.
Alongside them, the checks: forty eight hour average over a seventeen week reference period and whether an opt-out is needed, the twenty minute break on a shift over six hours, and eleven hours between shifts.
Leavers, statutory pay and the paperwork around them
Statutory redundancy by age, service and weekly pay at the current cap. Notice periods, statutory and contractual, resolved to an actual last working day rather than a number of weeks. Sick pay, maternity and paternity. Continuous service, which quietly determines when somebody gains rights they did not have last month.
And the number most employers never work out until it is too late: what a hire actually costs. Salary is roughly two thirds of it once employer National Insurance, pension contributions and the holiday they will take are counted, and quoting work off the raw salary is how a job that looked profitable turns out not to be.
Not in the United Kingdom? The entitlement inverts, and that is the point
Everything above is British statutory pay and leave, and it does not transfer. What is worth understanding is why, because the difference is structural rather than a matter of different numbers.
The same worker, the same absence, three different questions:
- In the United Kingdom, holiday is a PAID statutory entitlement. The argument is about how much, how it accrues and what counts as pay.
- In the United States, FMLA is UNPAID job protection. It does not give anybody a day of paid leave. It says that if you qualify, your job and your health cover are protected while you are away, and the whole question is whether you qualify.
- Continuation of health cover after leaving a job has no British equivalent whatsoever. COBRA exists because losing an American job can mean losing the family health plan. The NHS makes the question meaningless here, which is why nothing on the British side of this hub resembles it.
So the American tools here answer eligibility rather than entitlement. Whether FMLA covers you turns on three separate tests, and the one that catches people is measured at the worksite rather than at the company: fifty employees within seventy five miles. A large employer can have a worker who does not qualify.
Form I-9 is the other one worth knowing, because its deadline is tighter than people expect and it is counted in business days from the first day of work rather than from the offer.
Australia and Canada are not served in this hub yet beyond the tools that carry no country. Holiday, notice and termination are genuinely different instruments in both, and they are worth doing properly rather than quickly.