Article Contents
- Introduction
- What These Settings Control
- Where to Configure These Settings
- Where These Settings Are Used
- Differences Between Employment Bases
Introduction
Employment Basis, Ordinary Work Days, and Work Hours Per Ordinary Day help Hiro understand how a staff member is engaged, when they are ordinarily expected to work, and how that should flow through leave, Who’s In, payroll, and reporting.
These settings do more than store background HR information. Depending on the employment basis selected, they can affect which leave types are available, how leave dates are treated, how away periods appear in Who’s In, and how payroll and productivity figures are calculated.
This article explains what these settings control, where to configure them, and how they are used across Hiro.
What These Settings Control
Employment Basis
Employment Basis tells Hiro the broad type of working arrangement for that staff member.
In Hiro, the standard employment bases are:
- Full Time
- Part Time
- Casual
- Contract
- Work Experience
The selected basis helps Hiro determine how that user should be treated in areas such as:
- leave availability
- leave date handling
- Who’s In calendar behaviour
- payroll calculations
- productivity and employee-based reporting
In general terms, Hiro uses the selected basis to understand whether the person is treated as:
- permanent or non-permanent
- paid or unpaid
- full-time or part-time within a permanent arrangement
That means changing a user’s Employment Basis can change how other parts of the system behave for that staff member.
Ordinary Work Days
Ordinary Work Days define the user’s normal weekly work pattern.
This is especially important where a staff member does not ordinarily work a standard Monday to Friday pattern.
Ordinary Work Days are not just a visual note. They are used by Hiro when determining how certain leave, calendar, payroll, and reporting behaviours should be handled.
Depending on the user’s Employment Basis, Ordinary Work Days are used to determine:
- which leave dates are treated as valid working days
- which leave days appear in the Who’s In calendar
- how ordinary days are treated in payroll outputs
- how some expected-hours and productivity calculations are derived
Work Hours Per Ordinary Day
Work Hours Per Ordinary Day tells Hiro how many hours make up one ordinary working day for that person.
This matters because Hiro uses ordinary hours as part of payroll and reporting calculations.
Hiro includes a default ordinary-hours value of 7.6 hours per day, which aligns with a standard Australian full-time arrangement of 38 hours across five days.
That default can be changed to suit your organisation’s working arrangements. For example, some businesses use longer ordinary days across fewer days each week, such as 9 hours per day across a four-day week.
This setting can be controlled at two levels:
a global default for the whole organisation
a per-user override on the individual staff record
If a per-user value is not set, Hiro uses the global default as the baseline.
Where to Configure These Settings
Employment Basis, Ordinary Work Days, and Work Hours Per Ordinary Day are configured on the user record.
To access them:
- Go to Settings → User Accounts
- Open the relevant user
- Go to the Payroll tab
This is where you can configure settings such as:
- Employment basis
- Ordinary work days
- Work hours per ordinary day
- Overtime handling
- Xero employee links (if used in your setup)
- Ignore timesheets recorded prior to employee’s start date
Not every option applies to every employment basis. Hiro shows or hides some payroll-related fields depending on the basis selected. For example, Ordinary Work Days is only relevant for permanent part-time staff, so it is only shown when the user’s Employment Basis is set to Part Time.
⚠️ If a user was created through import, it is worth reviewing the Payroll tab afterward to make sure these settings are complete and accurate.
Global Default for Work Hours Per Ordinary Day
Hiro also has a tenant-wide default for ordinary hours per day in Settings → Payroll Hours & Cycles.
This is the baseline ordinary-hours value Hiro uses for permanent staff unless a per-user override has been entered on the user record.
For many businesses, this remains at 7.6 hours. Where your business uses a different standard working arrangement, this global default can be updated to match.
Ignore Timesheets Recorded Prior to Employee’s Start Date
The Ignore timesheets recorded prior to employee’s start date setting does not stop staff from entering timesheets and does not delete or exclude those timesheets from Hiro more broadly.
Instead, this setting is used when Hiro checks for payroll warnings about timesheets recorded before the employee’s start date.
If it is enabled, Hiro ignores pre-start timesheets when checking for that specific payroll warning.
Where These Settings Are Used
Leave and Who’s In
Employment Basis and Ordinary Work Days are used in both leave handling and how leave appears in Who’s In.
Leave Eligibility
Employment Basis affects which leave types a user can access.
Permanent staff are not restricted in the same way as non-permanent staff.
For non-permanent staff, including arrangements such as Casual, Contract, and Work Experience, leave options are narrower. These users can only use leave types that have been configured in Leave Types to allow casual staff. If a leave type is not set up to allow casual staff, it will not be available when a non-permanent user requests or is assigned leave.
This means the leave types shown when requesting or entering leave depend on both:
- the user’s Employment Basis
- the way each leave type has been configured in Leave Types
Leave Dates
Ordinary Work Days affect which days inside a leave period are treated as leave days.
This is most important for permanent part-time staff.
For permanent part-time staff, Hiro uses the Ordinary Work Days selected on the user record to decide which days inside a leave period count as valid leave days.
That means leave is aligned to the person’s normal weekly work pattern, rather than automatically treating every day in the selected date range the same way.
Who’s In Display
Ordinary Work Days also affect how leave appears in Who’s In.
For permanent part-time staff, if a leave record spans days outside the person’s selected Ordinary Work Days, those non-ordinary days are not shown as leave in the Who’s In calendar.
The leave record itself is not changed. Only the calendar display changes.
In practical terms:
- the staff member’s leave record remains intact
- the Who’s In calendar only shows the leave days that match the person’s ordinary work pattern
This allows the calendar to reflect when the person would ordinarily have been at work.
Payroll
These settings are also used in payroll calculations.
Employment Basis, Ordinary Work Days, Work Hours Per Ordinary Day, and Overtime Handling work together in the Payroll tab on a user record within User Accounts. Hiro uses them together when preparing payroll outputs.
These settings determine things such as:
- whether a day is treated as an ordinary day
- how many ordinary hours are expected for that day
- how leave hours are interpreted
- how public holidays and close-down periods are treated
- how worked hours are classified
- whether overtime or other handling rules apply
Work Hours Per Ordinary Day is part of this calculation chain. Hiro uses either the organisation-wide default or the per-user override, depending on whether a person-specific value has been entered.
Because these settings work together, Employment Basis should reflect the person’s real working arrangement, rather than being used as a rough label.
Reporting and Productivity
Employment Basis, Ordinary Work Days, and Work Hours Per Ordinary Day are also used in reporting and productivity calculations.
Depending on the report, these settings can influence:
expected-day or expected-hours logic
productivity calculations
employee-based distribution reporting
staff exports and payroll-related exports
In some reports, Hiro uses these settings to calculate the baseline it compares against.
In other reports, Hiro simply displays the selected Employment Basis as reference information.
Hiro uses the user’s current Employment Basis, current Ordinary Work Days, and the current applicable ordinary-hours setup when these reports are generated.
Hiro does not store these settings as point-in-time historical snapshots. This means that if a staff member’s working arrangement changes later, older periods will be recalculated using the newer setup.
For example, if someone was previously part-time and is later changed to full-time, a productivity report run afterward will use the full-time configuration when calculating past periods.
This is why it is important to update the user record promptly when a staff member’s working arrangement changes.
Differences Between Employment Bases
Different employment bases can behave differently in Hiro.
A few common examples:
Full-time arrangements are generally treated as having a standard ongoing work pattern.
Part-time arrangements rely more heavily on correctly configured Ordinary Work Days.
Casual arrangements can access only leave types configured to allow casual staff and are often treated differently in payroll and reporting.
Unpaid arrangements can be excluded from some paid-staff or pay-based calculations.
The exact downstream effect depends on the combination of settings used for that user, not just the display name of the basis alone.
That is why it is important to review the full Payroll tab, not only the Employment Basis dropdown.