Under the terms of the new Work and Families Act thousands of working parents will benefit from more leave and pay following the birth of a child.

From April 2007 mothers will receive nine months' statutory maternity pay, while fathers will get extended paternity leave.

At the same time, rights to flexible working arrange-ments will be extended from parents of small and disabled children to carers of the elderly and others.

Birmingham-based Multitime Systems says there is a growing need to strike a balance between the needs of employees and companies.

"With this Act, many fear a potentially unwieldy and stressful situation on the horizon -for all concerned," said Multitime managing director Ciaran Rowsome. "For example, the Government intends to increase paid maternity leave even further to 12 months by the end of Parliament.

"From that point, some of the mother's paid leave will become transferable to the father if she returns to work within a year.

"The burden of responsibility for administering both the new leave scheme and flexible working benefit for carers, will be placed on employers, who will have to decide whether their staff are eligible."

Multitime has designed web-based programmes that link employees and managers in electronic sessions to ensure everyone is kept "in the frame".

The system can log details of each request from an employee for the right to work flexibly and enable managers to predict electronically the impact of the employee's suggestion.

It compares the employee's new or potential hours with others in the group and ensure the group staff complement doesn't fall below critical level.

Where concerned the manager can use this data to, for example, refuse the proposed flexible arrangement.

Conversely, where satisfied with the request and agreeing to the flexible arrangement, the system is used to closely monitor activities.

Similar programmes will predict and the monitor the effects of requests for maternity and paternity leave.

Graham Cartwright runs Multitime's Birmingham operation, "Multitime has recently won an award in the US for its research into flexible working arrangements.

"The study showed that when management cater for employee's work/ life balance issues, then staff will respond positively in a way that can have far reaching effects such as leading to reductions in absenteeism, overtime and staff turnover with increases in workplace morale.

"Therefore, the system which we have designed focuses on reflecting this spirit of co-operation. Just one small example, is where staff can call up a report to see if the section will be properly staffed before deciding to take time off.

"Management can also call up an analysis of trends. These reports provide an excellent insight or overview as to the effects which the flexibility in terms of working time arrangements, can have.

"Analysis can be based on arrangements provided to individual staff or to staff generally. Therefore, concerns with business delivery can be avoided through the use of the transparent nature of the system's data. The focus is then on a mixture of sharing and good planning.

"So we feel with the use of our technology - instead of this new legislation being the latest business threat - it can actually be now embraced with positives for both sides."