Leave Management App Overview

Leave Management

1. What it is

Leave Management runs the time-off lifecycle for your organization — from defining leave types and accrual policies through to employee requests, manager approvals, and balance tracking. Employees request full days, half days, or partial-day blocks; managers approve or deny in the app, on their phone, or in bulk; and balances update automatically as leave accrues and is used.

• Enablement: Licensed and opt-in. An administrator enables it from Admin → Apps → All Apps, and it requires a licence.
• What it is not: Leave Management does not handle shift scheduling or timesheets — those are the Shifts Scheduling and Timesheets apps. Company holidays are maintained per location and excluded from leave-hour math automatically; they are managed under Administration → Holiday Management in the Leave sidebar.

2. Standing it up

1. Go to Admin → Apps → All Apps, find Leave Management, and enable it.
2. Go to Reports & Settings → Configuration in the Leave sidebar and open the Leave Configuration card (Manage Configuration), which opens the Leave Types page. Create at least one leave type (e.g. Vacation, Sick Leave). Each type needs a name, a color, and an icon. You can load industry-standard defaults from the Load Defaults menu instead of building from scratch.
3. For each leave type that tracks balances, create an accrual policy and set the accrual frequency (daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually, per pay period, per hours worked, or custom), the per-period amount in hours, and optionally an accrual cap and carryover rules.
4. Assign employees to accrual policies — individually, by department or location filter, or with Assign All. A policy marked Default Policy also covers every employee who has no explicit assignment.
5. If your organisation operates in multiple jurisdictions, open Availability on the Leave Types page and restrict specific leave types to the jurisdictions where they apply. Employees see only the types available in their work location.
6. Optionally configure blackout periods (Reports & Settings → Configuration → Blackout Periods) and coverage limits (Reports & Settings → Configuration → Coverage Limits) before the first requests come in. Both are also in the Administration group of the Leave sidebar.
7. Go to Reports & Settings → Configuration → Notification Settings to review who can approve leave, notification channels, request options (partial-day leave, who’s out while picking dates), and the Leave Management Agent settings.

Employees can now submit leave requests from the Leave Management app page, the mobile app, or Ask AI. Managers see pending requests in their manager dashboard and can decide from the app or follow the approval email to that request’s row on Team Requests.

Silent-until-configured pairing: an accrual policy with a blank accrual amount saves successfully but never accrues hours for anyone. Always set the per-period accrual amount when creating a policy.

3. How it fits together

Leave types are the categories of time off your organisation offers — Vacation, Sick Leave, Personal Leave, Bereavement, and so on. Each type carries its own rules: whether it deducts from a balance, whether it allows a negative balance, the advance-notice window, the backdating window, and whether supporting documentation is required (and after how many days). New leave types default to active, balance-deducting, and accrual-enabled.

Accrual policies govern how leave hours accumulate. A policy belongs to one leave type and accrues a fixed amount of hours on a schedule you choose. Policies support a waiting period for new hires, proration for mid-year starters, an accrual cap, and carryover with an optional maximum — at year end, unused hours above the carryover cap (or all of them, when carryover is off) are forfeited. A grace period and a forfeit-or-pay-out choice for excess hours belong to Banked Time (the overtime bank), not to accrual policies. Accrual rules let you adjust the rate by tenure, role, location, or employment type — for example, adding hours for employees with more than five years of service. A leave type can have multiple policies; each employee is assigned to one (or falls back to the type’s default policy).

Balances track each employee’s accrued, used, and available hours per leave type per year. All values are stored and displayed in hours (8 hours = 1 day). The balance is derived — it equals accrued minus used — and updates automatically when leave accrues, when requests are approved or cancelled, and when an admin adjusts hours manually.

Requests and approvals — employees submit requests for full days, half days (morning or afternoon), or partial days (a specific time window in 30-minute increments, when enabled). A request inside the advance-notice window, in a blackout period set to need special approval, or over a soft coverage limit is routed to special approval, so a manager can make the call; a blackout set to block requests, or a hard coverage limit, refuses it and the employee picks other dates. Statuses are: Pending approval, Special approval, Approved, Denied, and Cancelled. By default a manager approves leave for everyone at the locations they manage (or, if the company chooses, only their own reporting line), and admins can approve any request. Managers can delegate their approval authority while out of the office to a colleague who can approve leave — another manager, a leave administrator, a designated leave approver, or someone whose role approves leave.

Blackout periods vs coverage limits — these are easy to confuse. A blackout period is a date range during which new requests of specified leave types are either blocked entirely or routed to special approval. A coverage limit sets the maximum number (or percentage) of people who may be off at the same time, optionally scoped to a location (each location is counted on its own), with an optional separate weekend threshold. Blackouts prevent leave during a specific window (e.g. year-end freeze). Coverage limits prevent too many people from being off at once. Both can coexist.

4. Running it

Reviewing and approving requests

1. Go to My Team → Team Requests in the Leave sidebar and open Needs Action to see the requests waiting on you.
2. Select a request to see the employee’s balance, pending hours, and any coverage or blackout flags.
3. Approve or deny individually, or select multiple requests and use Approve selected / Deny selected. The approval email opens the request’s row on Team Requests; the decision itself is made there, where the balance and any shift conflicts are in view.

Adjusting an employee’s balance

1. Go to Administration → Leave Balances in the Leave sidebar, find the employee, and open their balance for a leave type.
2. Use Edit Accrued Hours (the pencil beside the accrued figure) or Add Usage (the Add button on Usage History) to correct the balance. Each adjustment is logged as a transaction in the accrual history.
3. To recount this year’s used hours (approved requests, manual usage and payouts) on every balance, use Recalculate All — accrued hours are not changed; it runs as a background task.

Managing blackout periods

1. Go to Reports & Settings → Configuration → Blackout Periods (or Administration → Blackout Periods) and create a period with a name, date range, and whether it should block requests or route them to special approval.
2. Optionally scope the blackout to specific leave types and/or locations.

Importing and exporting

• Leave types can be exported to CSV and imported from CSV with Export/Import on the Leave Types page (Reports & Settings → Configuration → Manage Configuration).
• Leave balances can be imported and exported (CSV or SFTP) from the More actions (⋮) menu on Administration → Leave Balances. Scheduled balance imports and exports are under Administration → Import / Export.
• Leave requests can be imported from the Import Time Off Requests card under Reports & Settings → Configuration for historical backfill — imported requests skip blackout, coverage, and backdating validations.

Running accruals manually

Go to Reports & Settings → Configuration, open Manage Configuration (the Leave Types page), then choose More actions (⋮) → Run Accruals in the page header. This processes accruals for all active employees as a background task and notifies you when complete.

5. Settings

Settings are configured at Reports & Settings → Configuration → Notification Settings unless noted otherwise.

Setting	Default	What it changes
AI Agent Enabled	On	Whether the Ask AI agent can answer leave questions and take actions for employees and managers.
Auto-approve leave requests up to this many days	3	When autonomous actions are enabled, the AI agent can auto-approve requests of this length or shorter.
Allow partial-day leave requests	Off	Whether employees can request a specific time window (e.g. 9:00 AM – 1:00 PM) instead of a full or half day.
Show “who’s out” while picking dates	On	Whether the leave request form shows teammates who are already off on the selected dates.
Managers approve leave for	Everyone at the locations they manage	Whether a manager approves leave for everyone at their locations or only for their own reporting line.
Who can approve leave	Managers and admins	Optionally adds a designated approver group who can approve any request, on top of managers and admins.

Per-leave-type settings are configured on each leave type on the Leave Types page (Reports & Settings → Configuration → Manage Configuration):

Setting	Default	What it changes
Deduct From Balance	On	Whether approved leave reduces the employee’s accrued balance.
Allow Negative Balance	Off	Off: hours the balance can’t cover are recorded as unpaid leave. On: the whole request is taken as paid time off and the balance goes below zero.
Accrual Enabled	On	Whether a balance is tracked and accrued for this type.
Advance Notice (days)	7	Requests submitted with less notice are routed to special approval instead of rejected.
Backdating Window (days)	14	How far into the past an employee can file a request (e.g. logging a sick day after the fact).
Documentation Required	Off	Whether supporting documents (e.g. a medical certificate) are required.
Documentation Threshold (days)	3	Documentation is required only for requests of this many days or longer.

6. More help

• Leave Management FAQ — specific setup, operating, and troubleshooting questions.
• Ask AI — the assistant answers leave balance, policy, and request questions from these articles.