TL;DR: If a company provides 80 hours of combined-use PTO for a year, and an employee uses all 80 hours of PTO for personal or vacation (non-NYSSLL covered) reasons, then that employee becomes ill and requests paid sick time within that same year, does NYSSLL mean the company would still need to provide up to 40 hours' worth of additional paid leave for reasons covered by NYSSLL? Or is it just enough that the employee is provided at least that much with potential use for sick leave, and if they use it for non-sick leave, that's their problem?
Details:
I work for a very very small company (two owners, one of which is my father-in-law, and currently two employees including myself). We do not have an HR department, though we do meet the requirements for providing NYSSLL paid sick leave of 40 hours/year (4 or fewer employees, >$1mil net income). Though my actual job is CAD, I've been asked to help with bringing on a new employee, so I'm looking for guidance on structuring and defining vacation and sick time.
We have identified that we will offer either 80 hours of total paid time off, or 120 hours (still trying to get owners to make the official call) but either way, this is more than the NYSSLL-mandated 40 hours of paid sick time per year.
Both owners previously worked for a large company (~500 employees) in CA, who provided a combined-use pool of PTO and seem to be leaning towards that. My concern is that, without a dedicated team who is managing payroll and human resources, we could potentially get into territory where we are non-compliant with NYSSLL. My opinion is that we should be defining these separately for incoming employees, and managing them separately for our own record-keeping and compliance, especially considering the legal requirements around record-keeping and providing reports when requested by the employee. Thoughts?