Leave Types & Balances

This guide covers defining leave types and how each employee's balance behaves over time.

Purpose

Not all leave works the same way — sick leave, vacation, and unpaid leave usually all follow different rules. This answers: "What kinds of leave does the company offer, and how does each one accrue, reset, and expire?"

Leave Types

A leave type defines:

• How many days it grants, and over what period.
• Paid or unpaid.
• Whether approval is required before a request is granted.
• Whether an attachment is required — useful for sick leave needing a note, for example.
• Whether holidays and company off-days inside a requested range count against the day total or are excluded from it.

Balances

Each employee has a separate balance per leave type they've been assigned. A balance isn't automatic — every leave type has to be explicitly assigned to each employee, either one at a time, in bulk, or as part of setting up the leave type itself.

Reset & Carry Forward

A leave type can be configured to reset on a schedule — yearly, monthly, or weekly — restoring the balance to its full allotment. Unused days can optionally carry forward into the next period, up to a configured maximum, and carried-forward days can themselves be set to expire after a certain amount of time rather than lingering indefinitely.

All of this happens automatically, on schedule, without anyone needing to manually reset balances.

What Each User Sees

Action	Employee	HR Administrator
View their own balance	✅	✅
View every employee's balances	—	✅
Create or edit leave types	—	✅
Assign a leave type / balance to an employee	—	✅

How Visibility Is Decided

1. Ownership. Everyone can see their own balance.
2. Permissions. Viewing every employee's balances, and creating or assigning leave types, requires the relevant permission.
3. Company. Leave types and balances belong to the company they were set up under.

Customization Options

• Reset schedule — yearly, monthly, or weekly, with the exact day configurable.
• Carry-forward cap and expiry — how many days can roll over, and how long they last before expiring.
• Unlimited leave types are supported, for leave that shouldn't be capped at a fixed number of days.

Good to Know

• Assigning a leave type doesn't happen on its own when someone's hired — it's a deliberate step, so double-check new hires have the leave types they're entitled to.
• Carry-forward and reset run automatically in the background on whatever schedule each leave type defines — there's no manual "close out the year" step required.

Every balance, right on schedule.