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What to do if an employee changes from full time to part time
What to do if an employee changes from full time to part time

An overview of steps to take in Sage HR if you have an employee move down to part-time hours.

Oliver Cook avatar
Written by Oliver Cook
Updated over 3 months ago

This article advises what to do in Sage HR if you have an employee going from full time hours to part time.

Things you need to consider in Sage HR is that amendments need to be to account to this change, for example their non-working days will now be different, as will their holiday allowance.

Below we outline what you need to do based on which Sage HR modules you use.


Core HR - Change employment status or Working pattern

Depending on what you use for the employee, you need to change their Employment status or working pattern.

Change employee's employment status

As a full-time employee they likely had an Employment status with only 2 non-working days (weekend days). As a part-time, if they are now working fewer days, they will have more non-working days.

This means you need to create a new employment status, mark which days are their weekend days (their non-working days), then assign the employee to this new employment status.

Change employee's working pattern

If you have an employee moving to part-time hours, you may need to change their working pattern.

Step 1 - Create a working pattern.

If you haven't already created a working pattern that applies to the employee's new part-time hours, you need to create a new working pattern. If you already have, move on to the next step.

Step 2 - Assign employee to their new working pattern

Once you have a relevant working pattern for the employee, you need to assign the employee to it. To assign them to a new working pattern simply click Eligibility on the working pattern, select the employee and click Save. If the employee was assigned to another working pattern, they are automatically unassigned from it to be assigned to their new one.


Leave Management - Change employee's time off policy

Step 1 - Calculate if the employee is under or over their entitled allowance

Depending on how your employee's time off policy accrues, you may need to work out if the employee is under or over their entitled allowance at the date of changeover to their working hours.

EXAMPLE: Your company's full-time policy gives full-time employees 20 days from January to December. If an employee switches from full-time to part time on 1st July, they would have accrued 10 days as a full time employee in the period 1st January to 30th June (six months). As an employer you would need to check if they have used more or less than 10 days during 1st January to 30th June.

You can check this in Time Off Reports. To get there:

  1. On the main menu click REPORTS, click TIME OFF, then click Time Off Reports.

  2. Select the employee and, then select the relevant full-time time off policy.

  3. In the From field, enter the start date of the holiday year.

  4. In the To field enter the date of their final day as a full time employee.

  5. Under Status select Approved

  6. If required, select other options.

  7. Click Generate.

  8. Once generated, if required you can export the report by clicking Excel or PDF.

This report shows you the time taken as a full time employee in this holiday year.


Step 2 - Check for future time off requests

If there are future time off requests, these will later need to be cancelled and booked again under a new time part-time time off policy.

Before you do this you need to run a report to see if the employee has any future time off booked for the remainder of the holiday year.

To do this, follow the same steps as shown in the previous step but change the From date to their first day as a part-time employee, and the To date to the last day of the holiday year.

Export this report via Excel or PDF for your records.

If there are no future time off request you can skip to Step 4.


Step 3 - Cancel future time off requests assigned to old time off policy

You need to cancel any future time off requests made under the employee's old policy so that they can be moved to the new part-time time off policy.

📎NOTE: Make sure you do this before swapping the employee over to their new time off policy. If you don't, when you try to book time off on dates where they already have time off, you will get an error message. You will have to move them back to the old policy to be able to cancel the other time off requests.


Step 4 - If required, create a part-time time off policy

If you don't have a labour based policy, part of your process of moving an employee from full time to part time in Sage HR involves moving them to a new time off policy for their part-time holiday entitlement.

If you already have a time off policy set up for part-time employees, move onto the next step.

If you don't have a time off policy ready yet, you need to create one first. This time off policy needs to have a different allocated time off allowance to your full-time. Based on our previous example in Step 1, a new part time policy would have 10 days allocated per year, rather than the full-time 20.

📌TIP: If you create a new time off policy, give it a name that clearly differentiates it from the one used by full-time employees.


Step 5 - Move the employee to the part-time time off policy.

You need to move your employee from their current full time policy, to their new part-time policy. This involves unassigning them from their current time off policy, then assigning them to their new policy. For steps on how to do this use our guide, Add employees to a time off policy.


Step 6 - Calculate the new entitlement for this holiday year under new policy

This is dependent on how your time off policies accrue and the date when the employee changes from full-time to part-time.

As the employee will spend part of the holiday year as a full time employee and the remainder as a part-time employee, they will not be entitled to a full year's allowance under the new part-time policy. You therefore need to calculate what the employee is now entitled to from their first day as a part-time employee until the end of the holiday year.

EXAMPLE: Based on our previous example in Step 1, a full-time employee in our company is entitled to 20 days for a full holiday year. A part-time employee for our company is entitled to 10 days for a full holiday year. Our company's holiday year runs from 1st January to 31st December.

The employee is changing to part-time on 1 July which is halfway through our holiday year. Therefore, they were entitled to half of the full year's allowance for the full time policy allowance (20 divided by 2) and will be entitled to half of the full year's allowance for the part-time policy (10 divided by 2).


Step 7 - Manually adjust the new policy entitlement to show part-time entitlement for remainder of the year

Once you have calculated the holiday entitlement for the employee's new part-time policy, you can adjust the time off policy to show this. You can do this by manually adding or subtracting time off to pro-rata the new policy entitlement for the remaining period.

EXAMPLE: In our part time policy that the employee is moving to they would have an annual allowance of 10 days.


Step 8 - What to do with underused or overused time off accrued from the full-time time off policy

You may want to add any unused days or subtract any overused days from the previous policy to their part-time holiday allowance for the rest of the holiday year. You can check the report you exported in Step 1 to see what the employee took in this period.

EXAMPLE: As per the example in Step 1, we calculated the employee was entitled to 10 days between 1 January to 30 June whilst on the full-time policy. However, during this period they only took 9 days, which left them with 1 day not used.

You can then make a manual adjustment any underused or overused days.

EXAMPLE: 5 days for 1 July to 31 December as a part-time employee + their 1 unused day as a full-time employee during 1 January to 30 June = 6 days for 1 July to 31 December period as a part time employee.


Step 9 - Reprocess future time off requests

You now need to book in the employee's future time off requests under the new part-time time off policy. You can use the report that you exported in Step 2 to view the dates that you need to book off for the employee.


Shift Scheduling

If you use the Shift Scheduling module there are a couple of things you need to consider if an employee is changing their working hours.

Schedule groups

You may need to create a new schedule group for the employee. This is in case you need to apply different schedule group limits and work hours.

Shift templates

Depending how the employee will be working their part-time hours, you may need to create new shift templates for shorter hours.


That's it, your employee is all sorted as a part-time hours employee in Sage HR!

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