How to Enter Maternity or Paternity Leave

To record maternity or paternity leave for an employee, simply follow these steps:

1. Go to the employee’s profile.
2. Click on their calendar.
3. Select the start date for the leave.
4. On the right-hand side, choose the appropriate leave type.

A few helpful tips:

• If the employee’s pay changes during their leave (for example, if they get a pay rise), you may need to manually update or override the pay details to reflect this change. 
• To manually change the SMP amount; 
  • Go to the Payroll utility and select the employee from the listing
  • Hold down the Shift key on your keyboard (Option + Ctrl if using a Mac) > 'Override amount'
• Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP) and pension contributions are usually calculated for you. However, if there are any special circumstances that the system doesn’t account for, you may need to work these out and enter them manually.

Please make sure that the leave dates and statutory pay calculations match the employee's records.

Important Note: BrightPay will calculate the pension % based on the SMP amount in the period. To continue to pay the Employer pension amount at the rate prior to the leave, you will need to change the settings to £ Basic Amount and then manually enter the pre-leave amount on the Employer pension line.

Employee returning to work early

If the employee decides to return to work early and does not take the full planned maternity leave, you will need to amend the calendar to adjust the number of weeks of leave.

Select the employee from the listing in the Employees section and go to 'Calendar'

Pick any date within the green maternity leave block and select 'maternity leave' on the right hand side.

Use the dropdown option to reduce the number of weeks to coincide with the employee's return to work date, so that the software will stop paying SMP accordingly. Save changes.

Likewise, if the employee decides to extend their maternity leave - you can use the dropdown field to increase the number of weeks. 

Maternity leave can be a maximum of 52 weeks from the start of leave. BrightPay will not apply SMP to an employee's payslip after 39 weeks of maternity leave.

To amend the start date of a maternity leave period, click on the maternity leave entry in the employee's calendar and update the start date as required. BrightPay will automatically recalculate the SMP schedule based on the new start date.

If the original start date falls within an already finalised pay period, you will need to reopen that payslip before you can amend the date.

This may also be useful where a baby arrives earlier than expected — if the maternity leave was set up in advance based on the expected start date, simply update the start date in the calendar to reflect when leave actually began and BrightPay will recalculate accordingly.

If the statutory pay is not appearing on the payslip as expected, check the dates of leave added on the calendar coincide with the period end on the payroll section. BrightPay calculates and pays statutory pay in full weeks and needs full weeks within the period - Example; the statutory leave starts on a Monday meaning the 'statutory full week' for this employee runs Monday to Sunday. BrightPay will then look at how many Sundays after the leave started fall into this pay period. For a weekly paid employee where the payroll period runs Saturday to Friday - the leave started after the Sunday in this week so there are no qualifying Sundays in this period - in this example the pay will be present in the following week.

If you receive an error message while trying to add maternity leave to the employee's calendar, ensure that the payslip in which the first day of leave falls, has not yet been finalised. You can only add maternity leave to an open pay period.

If you need to add maternity leave onto the calendar and the start date falls in an already finalised period, you will need to re-open the payslip first in the Payroll utility > add the leave onto the calendar > make any adjustments to the periodic pay if SMP now appears on the payslip > finalise the payslip again.

If when trying to extend maternity leave, you receive an error stating that an employee already has another period of parenting leave in the selected date range, this means there is an additional block of leave sitting in the calendar that is preventing the extension. Because all parenting leave appears in the same green colour on the employee calendar, two separate blocks of leave can look like a single continuous block, making it easy to miss.

To investigate, click on the last day of the leave currently showing in the calendar and check the details — compare the number of weeks and the Average Weekly Earnings (AWE) to the original leave period you are trying to extend. If the details differ, this is a separate block of leave that has been added in addition to the original.

Before you can extend the original leave period, you will need to remove the additional block. BrightPay only allows one leave type per day on the employee calendar, so any overlapping or consecutive leave entries must be cleared first. Once the additional block has been removed, you will be able to extend the original leave period as required.

If when trying to enter maternity leave onto an employee's calendar, the option for 'Maternity Leave' is greyed out - please check the employee's basic details section and that they have been entered as female. You may need to change this to female & save then go back to the calendar and the option for Maternity Leave should now be available.