Update for new sick pay features available

An update is now available for The Farmer’s Office and The Labor Contractor’s Office that includes the initial set of new features for handling the new sick pay law for California that goes into effect July 1.  Use the Check for Updates option on the menu to download the update.

Click here for a PDF with instructions on using the new features.

To support the new features, a number of updates must be made to several of the payroll database tables, including the employee table and the payroll check files. These update may take some time to complete.  We recommend that you plan to install the update after normal operating hours and start the new version of the program on your server so that these database updates can be completed as quickly as possible without disrupting your normal operations.

 

Sick Pay Leave Act Program Enhancements, Revised

This is an update to the previous article about the new California Sick Pay Leave Act and the implementation in Datatech Payroll software. We have some updates in the programming options and best practices to meet the requirements of the legislation.

Our disclaimer regarding the information in this article, manuals, help files and software:

•  Nothing should be interpreted as or relied on as legal advice.
•  Consult a qualified attorney about any matter of legal significance to you.

We also strongly recommend the following resources to help with your sick pay implementation:

•  http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Paid_Sick_Leave.htm (Frequently Asked Questions)
•  California Chamber of Commerce for webinar, employee handbooks, help developing a written sick pay policy

New miscellaneous deduction settings

A new setting has been added that can control when miscellaneous deductions are taken out on an employee’s check. The new setting provides some new capabilities and solves a couple of problems that customers have had when it comes to controlling when deductions are taken.  The new setting is available in version 7.37.1155 or higher of The Farmer’s Office and The Labor Contractor’s Office.

The new setting is called “Frequency” and may be set to the following values:

• Each Check
• One Time
• Weekly
• Biweekly
• Monthly
• Annually

The default value for the new Frequency setting is “Each Check”.  This will be set on all existing employee accounts and will be the default value on new accounts that are entered.  The “Each Check” setting will cause the program to operate as it always has.  If you don’t need to use the new setting, you do not need to do anything.

Main web site down

Our main web site has not been available today (6/9).

While we wait to hear back from our hosting company (which inconveniently gives us time to shop around for a new hosting company) the Check for Updates option in the program will not be available.  Right now we have a backup site running that you may or may not be able to get to, but the software update files are not currently on the backup site.

We will either be updating the backup site with the update files to restore this function or it will be restored when our hosting company solves the problem.  We’ll post an update on the blog when things are back up and running.

Update 6/10 10:30AM:  Service has been restored, our main web site is alive and Check for Updates is working.