The legalities are listed in the Swiss Code of Obligations (OR).
- Duration: At least 4 weeks of vacation. Until the employee reaches the age of 20, at least 5 weeks of vacation. – Art. 329a paragraph 1
- If the employee joins or leaves the company during the year, the vacation entitlement is calculated over the duration of the employment relationship. – Art. 329a para. 3
- Two vacation weeks must be claimed contiguously. – Art. 329c paragraph 1
- The employer determines the timing of the vacation, but takes into account the wishes of the employee. – Art. 329c paragraph 2
- Vacation may not be paid out during employment. – Art. 329d para. 2
- Vacations do not expire at the end of the year. The vacation entitlement only expires after 5 years. – Art. 128, para. 3
Further laws concerning vacations (e.g. reductions) can be found in the CO.
There are two ways to store time entitlements in the system.
- Automatic entitlement system
- Manually entered claims
We recommend you always work with the automatic claims. Only corrections should be entered manually.
Automatic claims
As the name suggests, automatic claims are calculated by the system itself. The entitlements are stored in the employee’s time recording.
The Automatic claims are also displayed in the list of claims:
Manual claims
Manual claims can be entered directly into the list
Calculation method:
The law always speaks of vacation weeks. How many vacation days correspond to such a week depends on the employment relationship, more precisely on the number of working days per working week.
EXAMPLE
Let’s take a company with 4 vacation weeks per year as an example. An employee who works 5 days per week throughout the year is entitled to
4 vacation weeks * 5 working days/week = 20 vacation days
Should an employee have joined or left during the year, the vacation entitlement must be calculated accordingly in accordance with Swiss law on the duration of the employment relationship. The law leaves open how exactly the calculation should take place. In practice, there are 2 types:
- Commercial: Each month is treated the same (30 days) for simplicity. The year has 360 days.
- Exact: The duration of the employment relationship in days is counted exactly and related to the total days of the year.
ems uses only the exact method in the calculation (since 2021)
In concrete terms, the vacation entitlement would be 275 days (01.04 up to and including 31.12) / 365 days (01.04 up to and including 31.12) if the employee joined the company on 1 April.
In the yellow marked area you will find the calculation (in the example above 365 of 365 days were calculated.