Leave Types

Leave types on a fresh install

A fresh production install has no leave types. Create the ones your organisation uses before anyone submits a request.

The development stack's demo data includes a typical set you can use as a starting point:

• Vacation 🌴: standard paid vacation, tracked against the annual balance
• Sick Leave 🤒: unplanned absence due to illness
• Conference 📚: time away for conferences and professional events
• Parental Leave 👶: maternity, paternity, or adoption leave

Creating a leave type

Leave types are managed by admins under Settings → Leave Types in the sidebar. Use the add button at the top of the list to create one. Each type has the following fields:

• Name: what employees see when submitting a request (e.g. "Study leave")
• Icon: a visual identifier shown alongside the leave type
• Slack status emoji: the emoji used for Slack status sync, e.g. :palm_tree:. Defaults to :calendar: when blank.
• Sort: display order; lower numbers appear first
• Affects balance: whether the type counts against the employee's annual allowance
• Background colour, Border colour, Text colour: how the type looks in the team calendar

Leave types can be edited at any time but not deleted, so past leave requests always keep their type.

Allowances and balances

Each employee has an annual leave allowance and a current leave balance. An admin sets the allowance in the user's Employee of record tab under My Organization. New users are pre-filled with the Default Annual Allowance from App Settings, and their starting balance equals their allowance.

Only leave types with Affects balance turned on are deducted from the balance. A request that would take the balance below zero is refused.

Each employee also has an absence balance reset day (usually 1 January). On that day the employee's annual allowance is added to their current balance, so unused days carry over, and the reset day moves forward one year. The job runs daily at midnight, so the worker service must be running. The reset day can be set when the user is created and is read-only after that.

Balance history

Every change to a balance is recorded: leave booked, days returned when a request is rejected or withdrawn, the annual allowance added on the reset day, and manual adjustments. Changes are grouped by leave year, and recorded entries are never edited: a correction is always a new entry.

• Employees see their own history under Balance History in the My Leave section of the sidebar.
• Admins can open the history of any user from My Organization. Managers can open it for their direct reports from Team Members.

An entry counts toward the leave year it was recorded in, which isn't always the year the absence falls in. The dashboard counts used days by the absence start date, so the two numbers can differ.

Adjusting a balance

The current balance can't be edited in the user form. To change it, an admin opens the user in My Organization and clicks Adjust balance. Enter a positive number to add days or a negative number to remove them, and a Reason, which is required and shown in the user's balance history. One adjustment can change the balance by up to 365 days in either direction.

Managers can't adjust balances.