An hours rule is a set of criteria that specifies how many hours an employee must work during a specified amount of time in order to be eligible for benefits. You can set the criteria for how to calculate the hours worked on the Hours Rule screen Rules tab, and you can set the criteria for including and excluding hours types on the Hours Filters tab.
You can require that an employee's hours meet any or all of the following evaluation criteria:
- A minimum number of hours worked during the measurement period that you set up in general eligibility criteria
- An average number of hours worked over a specified period of time
- A specific number of times an employee's hours cannot fall below a specified number hour hours per week during a specified time frame
Example: You can specify that an employee work a minimum of 130 hours per month to comply with the Affordable Care Act standards.
Note: If you set up more than one testing period, then the employee's hours must pass the test for each period in order for the employee to be considered eligible. If any one of the tests fails, then the employee does not meet eligibility requirements.
You use an hours rule when you set up in general eligibility criteria on the Eligibility Setup screen.
To set up criteria for how to evaluate the hours worked
- To open the Hours Rule screen, on the Eligibility Setup screen Rules tab, double-click in the Hours Rule box.
- In the Description box, type a description for the hours rule. When you add a new item to this Add/Edit list, the system automatically assigns and displays its unique ID number. The system selects the Active check box by default, which means the item is available on the list to pick during future record creation. Clear the check box to make the item inactive or grayed out. If you select the Default check box, WinTeam uses this item to automatically fill in the corresponding field on new records.
- In the Get Hours From list, do one of the following:
- To use timekeeping hours, select Timekeeping.
- To use payroll hours, select Payroll Checks - Wages.
- (optional) To specify the minimum number of hours an employee must work during a measurement period, in the Minimum Hours box, type the minimum number of hours, and then select either the Week option or the Month option.
- (optional) To specify the average number of hours an employee must work over a specified period of time, fill out the Minimum Average Hours Per Week box and the Use Average of Last boxes, and then, if you want to include weeks with no hours, select the Include weeks with zero hours check box.
- (optional) To specify the number of times an employee's hours cannot fall below a specified number of hours per week during a specified time frame, fill out the Cannot fall below, Hrs/week more than, and times during the last boxes.
- On the Hours Rule screen Hours Filters tab, use the filters to specify which hours types to include and which to exclude in the calculation of hours worked.