What this feature does
Leave management keeps employee leave in the same place as the rest of your center's operations: which leave types you offer, who has requested what, how much each person has left, and how leave affects pay.
Full leave tools—types, entitlements, balances and reports—are part of the Payroll module on eligible center plans. Open Payroll → Leave in the dashboard.
Requests are raised by an administrator
Employees do not apply for leave themselves. There is no employee self-service screen: a center administrator raises the request on the employee's behalf, choosing the person, the leave type, the dates and a reason. Staff employees cannot see leave requests or balances at all.
Requests are always created as Pending. The person submitting cannot set a request to approved.
Approving, rejecting and editing
From the leave list an administrator approves or rejects each pending request.
- Rejecting or deleting an approved request automatically reverses its effects
- Editing an approved request's dates or leave type re-runs the same entitlement and overlap checks the original approval had to pass, and moves its attendance markers to the new dates
Two approved requests can never cover the same day, even under different leave types—approval is refused with a message naming the clashing dates. Overlap is checked at approval, not at creation, so you can legitimately hold several pending alternatives for the same dates and approve the one you settle on.
Approving beyond the remaining entitlement is refused with a specific explanation, for example: "Casual Leave allows 12 days in 2026. 10 days already approved, so only 2 days remain, but this request needs 3 days."
Leave types and their policies
You define your own leave types under Payroll → Leave → Manage. Each has a name, description, a number of annual days, and whether the leave is payable—unpayable leave is deducted from pay in full.
Four policy options sit on top, and each defaults to the simplest behaviour, so nothing changes until you configure it:
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Accrual | Annual gives the whole allowance from day one. Monthly releases a twelfth at the end of each completed month |
| Pro-rata for joiners | A mid-year joiner gets only the share of the year they are employed for |
| Carry-forward limit | Days in excess of the limit are lost at year end. Zero means nothing carries over |
| Carry-forward expiry month | Carried days disappear after this month if unused |
Balances
The balances grid shows every employee against every leave type as "X left · Y used". You can type a different annual entitlement for any individual for a given year, overriding the leave type's default.
Balances are always worked out from your data, never stored as a separate number: entitlement comes from the leave type or your per-employee override, and days used are added up from approved requests. That means the figures on screen always agree with the requests that actually exist.
Half days
A single-day request can be marked as a half day, counting as half a day against both entitlement and pay. The tick box only becomes available when the start and end dates are the same, so a half-day flag cannot be applied to a whole week by accident.
How leave reaches attendance and pay
Approving a request marks each of its days as Leave on the employee's attendance record, remembering what the day was before, so a later reversal restores the original Present or Absent rather than erasing a real record.
At payroll time:
- Approved leave within entitlement is paid
- Anything beyond entitlement, and any leave of an unpayable type, becomes an unpaid-leave deduction
- Entitlement is counted against days already taken earlier in the same year, so an employee with twelve annual days cannot take twelve paid days every month
Days your center is closed are not counted against leave at all—see Holiday and working-day calendar.
The leave report
Under Payroll → Leave → Report, pick a year and optionally narrow to one employee or one leave type. The downloadable PDF has two parts: a summary of every employee against every leave type showing remaining days out of entitlement with days taken, and a detailed list of approved requests with dates, days, reason and status. It counts days using your holiday calendar and half-day flags, so it agrees exactly with the balances on screen.
Good to know
- A request spanning December into January is charged against each year's entitlement separately.
- If two administrators approve at the same moment, the approvals are applied one after the other, so neither can push an employee over their limit.
- Where carry-forward is configured, a job at the start of each year writes each employee's carried figure onto their record. This fixes the number, so a later edit to a previous year's request cannot quietly change what people are owed now.
- On plans without the Payroll module, centers see a single "Other" leave type. Leave is recorded but carries no entitlement and is not tracked in the balances grid.