PayNow Solutions, Inc., a FinTech company based in Taguig City providing digital payment and lending platforms to small and medium enterprises…

Explanation

The Supreme Court in Auto Bus Transport Systems v. Bautista clarified that employees engaged on task or contract basis or paid on purely commission basis are not automatically excluded from entitlement to service incentive leave. Instead, exclusion applies only if they also fall under the classification of field personnel, meaning their actual hours of work cannot be determined with reasonable certainty and their performance is unsupervised. Thus, being paid per module or per task does not by itself exclude an employee from holiday pay or service incentive leave; it must also be established that the employee is a field personnel as defined by law.

Application to the facts

Arjohn is paid PHP 5,000.00 per completed module regardless of hours spent, and he works from home. He is required to log in and log out from the North Star Human Resource platform for authentication, data security, and submission purposes, but there is no evidence in the facts provided that PayNow Solutions, Inc. uses this system to monitor or regulate his actual working hours or performance beyond these technical requirements. The Supreme Court in Auto Bus Transport Systems v. Bautista requires an inquiry into whether the employer can determine the employee's actual hours of work with reasonable certainty. The facts do not establish whether the log-in/log-out requirement enables the employer to determine Arjohn's actual hours of work with reasonable certainty, or whether his time and performance are constantly supervised. Therefore, it cannot be conclusively determined from the given facts whether Arjohn is excluded from holiday pay and service incentive leave as a field personnel. What remains unestablished is whether the employer's system allows for reasonable certainty in determining Arjohn's actual hours of work.