Give the choice of more annual leave or more take-home pay to suit everyone’s lifestyle
What is Holiday Trading?
Holiday Trading is a benefit that allows eligible employees to trade in holiday allowance for cash or exchange cash for extra holiday. Holiday Trading can improve work-life balance and helps create an engaged, happy and positive workforce.
How does Holiday Trading work?
Choose: When to open and close application windows to best suit your business. Most employers open one or two windows per year, lasting around 3 weeks each. We recommend setting aside 3 - 4 weeks to set up the benefit before launch.
Choose: The number of days an employee can buy and/or sell, along with the cost of 1 day or 1 hour's holiday, is determined by the employer. You can define these individually for each employee. Employees who are not eligible to apply will not see any links to Holiday Trading on the site.
Choose: You can set up Holiday Trading on Pre-Approval, for reduced admin. With Pre-Approval, the system processes applications automatically, based on eligibility data supplied before opening a window. If you want full control over the process, you can choose Post-Approval instead, and approve, reject and amend requests manually after each window.
Note: Holiday Trading is part of SmartPay™, our salary sacrifice and payroll benefits administration portal. With SmartPay™ you can manage all Reward Gateway salary sacrifice and payroll benefits in one place, and download the reports you need to process salary deductions.
Things to consider when setting up Holiday Trading
When would you like your Holiday Trading window to open and close?
How would you like to manage allowances and repayments?
- Will you allow employees to buy holiday, sell holiday, or both?
- Will Holiday Trading units be measured in days or hours?
- What is the minimum amount employees can apply for? (e.g. 0.5 days)
- How many months would you like to spread monthly repayments over?
How would you like to process applications?
- Pre-approval - you will need to supply additional information in your eligibility file to allow our system to perform eligibility checks.
- Post-approval - an administrator (usually a payroll professional, or each employee’s line manager) will need to manually review applications.
How many payrolls are there in your business? For each we will need:
- Name (e.g. Monthly) - required to assign users to the correct payrolls
- Frequency (monthly, weekly, fortnightly)
- First Pay Day to set up in the system (i.e. date employees are paid)
- First Cut-off Date (i.e. date the first deduction report will be available)
- Approver - one or more users to manage applications in each payroll
Who will manage your Holiday Trading programme on SmartPay?
- Master Approver - can access payroll information, application details and product configuration settings for all benefits set up on SmartPay
- Payroll Approver - can access all payrolls set up on SmartPay
- Product Approver - can manage Holiday Trading configuration settings
Additional information for your eligibility file
- Payroll name - required for each employee
- Holiday Trading rate - measured in days or hours (add 0 if ineligible)
- Holiday Trading units - days or hours (or “none” if ineligible)
- Holiday Buy allowance - for eligible users only (add 0 if ineligible to buy)
- Holiday Sell allowance - for eligible users only (add 0 if ineligible to sell)
- Date of birth - required on Pre-Approval
- Annual gross salary - required on Pre-Approval
- Weekly hours worked - optional on Pre-approval (system default is 40)
- Weeks worked per year - optional on Pre-approval (system default is 52)
- Other gross salary deductions - optional on Pre-Approval
- Line Manager ID - only required on Post-Approval, when you would like line managers to review their direct reports’ applications
There should not be any empty cells on your file.