Leave

The Leave module manages time off — leave types, balances, requests, and approvals. It's used by every employee requesting time off, with reporting managers and HR administrators reviewing and approving.

This guide gives the big picture: what the module is for, how a leave request flows end to end, who sees what, and what can be customized. Deeper guides for each area are linked below. No technical background needed.

Purpose

Leave answers a question every employee and manager deals with regularly: "How much time off is available, and how does someone actually take it?"

Instead of leave being tracked on a spreadsheet, everything lives in one place:

• Leave types, each with its own rules for balance, reset, and carry-forward.
• A running balance per employee, per leave type.
• Requests, reviewed and approved along the reporting line.
• A way to request extra days be added to a balance, and to convert a day worked on a holiday into a day off later.

What's Included

Leave is made up of a few connected areas, each covered in its own guide:

Area	What it covers
Leave Types & Balances	Defining leave types, how balances reset and carry forward, and how they expire.
Requesting & Approving Leave	Submitting a leave request, approval (including multi-level approval), and withdrawing or rejecting one.
Allocation & Compensatory Leave	Requesting extra days be added to a balance, and earning leave for working a holiday.

The Leave Journey

1. A leave type is set up, with how many days it grants, how often it resets, whether unused days carry forward, and whether it's paid or unpaid.
2. Employees are assigned that leave type, giving each of them a starting balance to draw from.
3. An employee requests time off, choosing a leave type and a date range. If the leave type doesn't require approval, it's granted immediately; otherwise it waits for review.
4. A manager reviews and decides. Depending on how the company has it configured, a single manager's approval may be enough, or a request may need to move through several approvers in sequence for longer stretches of leave.
5. The balance updates. Approved days are deducted from the employee's balance; a rejected request leaves the balance untouched.

What Each User Sees

Leave area	Employee	Reporting Manager	HR Administrator
Request their own leave	✅	✅	✅
View their own balance & requests	✅	✅	✅
View their team's requests	—	✅	✅
View every request company-wide	—	—	✅
Approve or reject a request	—	✅ (their team)	✅
Assign leave types & balances	—	—	✅
Create or edit leave types	—	—	✅

In short:

• Employees request their own leave and track their own balance.
• Reporting Managers review, approve, and reject their team's requests, following the standard manager-hierarchy visibility used across the system.
• HR Administrators set up leave types, assign balances, and see and manage everything.

How Visibility Is Decided

1. Ownership. Everyone can always request leave for themselves and see their own balance and history.
2. The reporting line. A reporting manager can see and act on their team's requests — this is the manager-hierarchy pattern used throughout the system (see User Roles & Access), and for leave, it can also include anyone specifically registered as an approval manager for a multi-step approval chain.
3. Permissions. Company-wide visibility and leave-type management require the relevant permission.
4. Company. Leave types, balances, and requests belong to the company they were created under.

Customization Options

• Leave types are fully configurable: how many days, paid or unpaid, whether approval is required, whether an attachment is required, and how reset and carry-forward work.
• Multi-level approval can be configured per department, requiring a request over a certain number of days to move through a sequence of approvers rather than just one.
• Blackout periods can restrict requesting leave in a given date range, scoped to a department and optionally a job position or specific leave types.

Good to Know

• New employees don't automatically get every leave type. Each leave type has to be explicitly assigned to each employee — individually, in bulk, or when the leave type itself is created — so it's worth checking this as part of onboarding a new hire.
• Holidays and recurring company off-days are shared, company-wide settings, not something configured separately inside Leave — see Settings.
• Balances reset and expire automatically, on whatever schedule each leave type is configured for — no manual step needed to roll a balance into a new period.

Time off, tracked without the spreadsheet.