From XU Magazine, 
Online News

How You Can Track Furlough Online

May 7, 2020

Many businesses in the UK are looking to, or already have, taken up government funding through the Job Retention Scheme. This scheme was put in place on 20th March 2020, to deal with the pressures that businesses are facing as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak and allows businesses to claim up to 80% of an employee's salary if the employee is furloughed.
This article originated from the Xero blog. The XU Hub is an independent news and media platform - for Xero users, by Xero users. Any content, imagery and associated links below are directly from Xero and not produced by the XU Hub.
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If your business is choosing to furlough employees, you will need to keep track of who has and hasn’t been furloughed as well as having access to the key information required for the funding application.

Here are some of the ways Appogee HR and Appogee Leave can help with managing the furlough process and sharing the information you need to;

SETTING A “FURLOUGH” STATUS

Once you have made the difficult decision to furlough an employee to protect both the employment status of the individual and your business success, you must record this. HMRC may require information around this any time in the next 5 years.

Within Appogee HRs customisable Employee Profiles you can create fields for any information you wish to track. In this instance, we would recommend setting up a “Furlough Status” field with a fixed set of options to track the status of your employees. This will make it easy to identify the employees who have been furloughed and report on this information at any time.

There are likely to be other bits of employee information that you will also now need to track such as when the Furlough period runs from and to and how much has been claimed. All these can be set up and recorded using Appogee HR.

REPORTING ON FURLOUGHED EMPLOYEES

To actually apply for the government scheme you will need to provide a set of information about your business and the employees you are claiming for. Here is just some of the information required as part of the application process;

  • Employee Name
  • National Insurance Number
  • Payroll Number
  • Furlough Start Date
  • Furlough End Date etc

Appogee HR makes this simple, with flexible Reporting allowing you to extract just the Employee Profile Fields you need in just a few seconds.

Continue using your “Furlough Status” field and any others you have added to build Reports for Employees still working or those who have been Furloughed, as well as using the Reports to review the status for years to come.

TRACK AND SHARE EMPLOYEE AVAILABILITY

When an employee has been furloughed, they must not work for your business at all, not even remotely. If you have a mixture of employees you have had to furlough and some who are still working, it is important to be transparent with everyone on who is and isn’t available in a work capacity.

Using Leave Types you can set certain employees to a “Furlough” type and therefore not available, alongside tracking other types of absence and sickness. During a time of extreme uncertainty, the more transparent you are with your employees the better for everyone involved.

KEEP RECORD OF FURLOUGH DOCUMENTATION

Paperwork will need to be completed for the employee as part of the Job Retention Scheme, allowing you to claim for furloughed employees. It is crucial to keep this safe and secure for future reference, if needed.

Using Appogee HRs secure Records functionality, any records associated with an individual for this process can be stored within the Employee Profile and accessed at anytime.

Please get in touch with us today to book in a demo so we can show you how we could help not only support the furlough process in your business, but also provide many other benefits for your remote workers. We also offer a full access, free, 14-day trial which can be started from here.

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