Leave Management

Leave Management records your employees' holiday, sickness and other absence against an annual entitlement, with approval where a leave type needs it. Requests are filed by a manager on the employee's behalf.

Setting Up

Leave Settings opens on General Settings:

• Default Annual Leave Entitlement — the days of Annual Leave every new balance starts with, 28 unless you change it. Annual Leave always takes this figure; every other leave type uses the days set on the type itself
• Leave Year Start Month and Start Day — the day your leave year begins, 1 January unless you change it. The day has to exist in that month every year, so February stops at 28
• Allow Carry Over and Maximum Carry Over Days — whether unused Annual Leave moves into the next leave year, and how much of it. See Carry-Over below

Click Save Settings. Under it are the Leave Types. Every company starts with six:

Add your own types or edit these — name, colour, days per year (0 means tracked only), whether a manager must approve, whether it is paid. Annual Leave's days are changed through Default Annual Leave Entitlement, not on the type. The system types cannot be deleted, only switched off.

Then click Initialize Balances: every active employee gets a balance for every active leave type, for the leave year that contains today. It only fills in what is missing — a balance that already exists keeps its entitlement and its used days — so it is safe to click again after adding an employee or a leave type. For the same reason a new Default Annual Leave Entitlement, or new days on a type, applies to balances created from then on, not to the ones already there.

The confirmation names the leave year it worked on — Leave year 1 Jan 2026 – 31 Dec 2026 — and says how many balances it created and how many took carried-over days. Click the button once at the start of every leave year. If nobody does, a balance is still created the moment a request for that year is approved.

The Leave Year

A leave year is the twelve months from your start date, written with both ends — for example 1 Apr 2026 – 31 Mar 2027; the Initialize Balances section of Leave Settings shows the one that contains today. It is your company's own and has nothing to do with the accounting fiscal year under Company Settings → Fiscal Years: you do not need a fiscal year to use leave. Every balance belongs to one leave year and keeps the dates it was created with.

If you move the start date, nothing already recorded changes. The balances on file keep their dates; the next year begins the day after they end and runs only up to your new start date — one short in-between year. Entitlements for it are reduced in proportion to its length and rounded up to the half day: moving from 1 January to 1 April gives an in-between year of 1 Jan – 31 Mar, in which 28 days become 7. From the new start date on, years are twelve months again.

Carry-Over

With Allow Carry Over switched on, Initialize Balances also carries unused days forward. It applies to Annual Leave only — Bank Holiday, Sick Leave and any type you add never carry.

• Each employee's Annual Leave balance for the current leave year takes the days left on their balance for the year that ended the day before it began — never less than zero, never more than Maximum Carry Over Days
• Only that one year is looked at. Whatever was left on an older year has lapsed
• The figure is worked out afresh on every click, not added to: clicking twice changes nothing, and clicking again after approving or cancelling some of last year's leave puts the figure right
• Nothing carries by itself on the first day of the year. It happens when you click Initialize Balances, so click it at the start of each leave year — the short in-between one included
• Switching Allow Carry Over off later stops any further carrying; days already carried stay on the balance

Requesting Leave

From HR → Leave → Request, or Request Leave on the Leave tab of the employee's record, which opens the form with that employee already chosen (an employee whose status is not Active is not in the picker, so the form opens with nobody chosen):

1. Choose the Employee and the Leave Type
2. Set the Start Date and End Date, ticking Half day at either end if needed
3. Add a Reason (optional) and Submit Request

The summary on the right counts the Business Days — weekends are excluded — and, once the leave year of the Start Date has a balance, shows the Remaining Balance with that leave year under it. While that year has no balance yet — Initialize Balances has not been clicked for it — only the Business Days are shown, and there is no balance warning. A request that overlaps another pending or approved request for the same employee is refused. A request that exceeds the balance is allowed with a warning.

A request is charged to the leave year its Start Date falls in, and it may not run past the end of that year: A request cannot run past the end of the leave year (31 Mar 2027). Enter the days after it as a second request. For a holiday that straddles the year end, enter two requests — one up to the last day of the year, one from the first day of the next. Leave in a year that has not started yet can be entered now; approving it creates that year's balance.

A type that needs no approval, such as Sick Leave, is approved as it is submitted and the days come off the balance immediately.

Approving

On HR → Leave, pending rows offer Approve and Reject, each with an optional note for the employee. Approving takes the days from the balance of the leave year the request starts in; rejecting does not. A request is approved once: a second click on a page that was left open takes nothing more. An approved request can be cancelled, which puts the days back. Any manager can decide any request.

Balances

The Leave tab on an employee's record shows a bar per type for the current leave year — used, remaining and carried over — and their recent requests.