Leave

TrakIT can manage your employees’ leave. Employees apply for leave, their managers and any further approvers decide, and TrakIT keeps a balance of days for each employee and type of leave. Approved leave is written to attendance, and the figures are ready for payroll.

Leave is set up separately for each company, on Leave configuration. To start, see Set up leave for a company.

Employees and managers

Employees are TrakIT users with an employee record: see Employee. Only users with an employee record can apply for leave, and they apply for the leave types of their own company. The leave module also uses these details of the employee record:

Detail	Used for
Manager	The first approver of every application. An employee without a manager can’t apply for leave. When an employee’s manager changes, the applications waiting for the old manager’s decision move to the new one.
Department	Approval levels set up for a department, and the department figures of the reports.
Start Date	The minimum service a leave type may require, the pro-rating of a new employee’s first accrual, and the date of anniversary accruals.
Status	Employees who have left (Resigned, Terminated or Retired) earn no more accrual.
Gender	Leave types restricted to one gender.

Leave types and policies

Each company has its own leave types, for example annual leave, sick leave and unpaid leave. A type is paid or unpaid, can allow half days, and can ask for a supporting document beyond a number of days.

Each type has a policy, kept in dated versions: how days are credited, the yearly entitlement, the limits on using them, what happens to unused days at year end, whether the balance can go below zero, and how many approval levels applications need. TrakIT uses the version in force on the date concerned, for example the first day of the leave, so a policy change from a date leaves earlier leave under the rules that applied then.

See the Leave Types tab and the Policy Rules tab.

How days are counted

An application covers every calendar day from its first to its last day. TrakIT counts each day as:

• 0 for a Saturday or a Sunday;
• 0 for a holiday of the country of the employee’s company, as listed on Country Holidays;
• 0.5 for a half day, which can be the first or the last day when the leave type allows half days;
• 1 for any other day.

For example, leave from a Thursday to the following Tuesday, with no holiday, counts 4 days.

Leave years are calendar years. An application is counted in the year it starts, even when it runs into the next one.

Balances

Each employee has a balance for each leave type and leave year:

Figure	Means
Opening	Days carried forward from the previous year.
Accrued	Days credited by accrual during the year.
Used	Days of approved leave, less the days of approved leave cancelled later.
Adjusted	Days added or taken off by HR, including imported opening balances.
Encashed	Days paid out in cash.
Lapsed	Days lost at year end, or when carried-forward days expire.
Closing	The balance: Opening + Accrued + Adjusted − Used − Encashed − Lapsed.

Employees see their own balances on My leaves, and HR and managers on the Leave Balance report.

The leave ledger

Every change to a balance is an entry in the employee’s leave ledger: an accrual, the use of days by approved leave, the reversal of a cancelled leave, an adjustment, a carry-forward or a lapse. The balance figures are the totals of these entries. An entry is never changed or deleted: a correction is a new entry.

No entry may take away more days than the balance has. The Closing balance can’t go below zero, or, if the type’s policy allows a negative balance, below minus its limit. TrakIT then refuses with Insufficient leave balance. This applies to every deduction, including unpaid leave, so unpaid leave types need a policy that allows a negative balance. See Paid and unpaid types.

Accrual

Accrual is how employees earn days. TrakIT runs it once a day for every company that has active leave types, and credits each period once only, so a day missed is caught up on the next run. What it credits depends on the policy’s Accrual Frequency:

Frequency	When TrakIT credits Days per Cycle	Pro-rating
Fixed grant	Never: TrakIT credits nothing by itself. HR gives employees their days with an opening balance file.	–
Monthly	At the start of each month.	With Pro-rate new joiners, an employee who starts during the month gets a share in proportion to the days employed.
Yearly	In January, to employees employed in January. Employees who join later in the year get their first credit the following January.	With Pro-rate new joiners, an employee who starts during January gets a share for the part of the year employed.
On anniversary	In the month of the employee’s Start Date, from the first anniversary on.	Never pro-rated.

TrakIT reduces a credit so that the year’s accruals don’t pass the policy’s Annual Entitlement, when it is set, and the balance doesn’t pass its Max Balance. Employees who have left earn nothing, and nor do inactive leave types or types with no policy for the period.

Year end: carry-forward and lapse

From 1 January, TrakIT closes the previous leave year for each employee and leave type, using the policy in force on 31 December:

• If Carry Forward is allowed, the closing balance moves into the new year, up to the policy’s maximum, as the new year’s Opening. The rest lapses.
• If it is not allowed, the whole closing balance lapses.
• A balance of zero or less moves nothing. A negative balance stays in the old year, and nothing is carried into the new one.

Lapsed days show in the old year’s Lapsed figure. The run repeats every day in January, so a missed day is caught up, and never moves the same balance twice.

If the policy sets Expires after months, carried-forward days that are still unused that many months after 1 January lapse. TrakIT lapses the smaller of the days carried forward and the current balance, because days the employee has taken in the meantime came out of the same balance.

Adjustments and opening balances

HR adds or takes off days by uploading a file on the Opening Balances tab: typically the balances employees had when your company started managing leave in TrakIT, and later any corrections. Each row is an adjustment, shown in the Adjusted figure.

Applying for leave and approval

1. The employee applies on My leaves: they choose the leave type and the dates, and TrakIT shows the days counted, the balance left and any problem before they submit. They can also save the application as a draft and submit it later.
2. When they submit, TrakIT checks that they have a manager, that the leave type is available to them, that they have served the policy’s minimum days, that the leave has working days and no more than the policy’s consecutive days, that it doesn’t overlap another pending or approved application, and, for a paid type, that their balance covers it, unless the policy allows a negative balance.
3. If the policy needs approval, the application is Pending and goes to the employee’s manager. If not, it is approved at once and its days are deducted.
4. The manager approves or rejects it on Leave approval. Rejecting needs a reason.
5. After the manager approves, the application may go to a second and a third approver, as set up in the approval matrix. An application left too long at those levels can escalate.
6. On the final approval, TrakIT deducts the days from the balance and writes them to attendance.

Approvers can hand their approvals to another user for a period, for example while they are away themselves: see Leave approval. Each decision, escalation and cancellation is also added to the application’s notes.

Statuses

Status	Means
Draft	Saved by the employee but not submitted. Nothing is checked or deducted yet.
Pending	Submitted and waiting for an approver.
Approved	Finally approved. Its days are deducted from the balance and written to attendance.
Rejected	Rejected by an approver.
Cancelled	Cancelled by the employee.

Cancelling

Employees cancel their own applications on My leaves. A draft or a pending application can be cancelled at any time. An approved application can be cancelled only before its first day: its days go back to the balance, and the attendance days it set go back to Present.

An application inside a closed payroll period can’t be cancelled, changed or decided.

Leave and attendance

When an application is finally approved, TrakIT marks each of its leave days on Attendance: On Leave for a full day, Half Day Leave for a half day, with the leave type’s name in the remarks. Weekends and holidays are left as they are. TrakIT adds the day to the attendance if it isn’t there yet.

When an approved application is cancelled, its days go back to Present, unless someone has changed them on the attendance in the meantime.

Loss of pay

Once a day, TrakIT looks at the previous day’s attendance. An employee marked Absent with no approved leave for that day gets an approved, one-day application of the company’s unpaid leave type, marked as loss of pay (LOP). Its reason says the employee was absent with no approved leave. The attendance stays Absent.

For this to work, the company needs an active unpaid leave type whose policy allows a negative balance: see Paid and unpaid types. Without one, the absence is not converted. Loss-of-pay days show as LOP in the Leave reports.

Payroll periods

When payroll has used the leave figures of a period, HR closes the period on the Payroll Cut-off tab. The applications inside it are then frozen: nobody can change, cancel or decide them until HR re-opens the period.

The Monthly Summary report gives the paid, unpaid and loss-of-pay days of each employee in a month. Payroll systems can read the same figures through the TrakIT API, when TrakIT Support sets this up. Each key a payroll system uses works for one company.

Notifications

When	Who is told	How
An application that needs approval is submitted	The employee’s manager	Email
An application approved at one level goes to the next	The next approver	Chat message and email
An application is finally approved or rejected	The employee	Email, with the reason for a rejection
An application escalates	The new approver and the original approver	Chat message and email
An approver delegates their approvals	The delegate	Chat message and email

Emails go only to users with an email address in TrakIT.

The pages of the module

Page	Where	Use it to
My leaves	HR > My Leaves	Apply for leave, follow your applications, see your balances and your leave calendar.
Leave approval	HR > Leaves > Approval	Approve or reject the applications waiting for you, see your team’s leave, and delegate your approvals.
Leave reports	HR > Leaves > Reports	Run the balance, usage, department, monthly summary and pending approvals reports.
Leave configuration	HR > Leaves > Configuration	Set up leave types, policies, approval levels, opening balances and payroll periods.

Who does what

The leave permissions are in the Leave Management section of a role:

Permission	Usually for	Allows you to
Read	Every employee	Open My Leaves: see your applications, balances and leave calendar, and cancel your applications.
Create	Every employee	Apply for leave and save drafts.
Approve/Reject Leave	Managers and other approvers	Open Leave Approvals: decide the applications waiting for you, delegated to you or escalated to you, see your team’s leave, and delegate your approvals.
View Team Leave	Managers	Run the leave reports for your direct reports.
Adjust Balance	HR	Upload opening balances and corrections on Leave Configuration, which also needs Configure Leave Policy, and run the leave reports for all employees.
Configure Leave Policy	HR	Open Leave Configuration and set up leave, and run the leave reports for all employees. An HR user with this permission can also be picked as a Role approver in the approval matrix.

Update and Delete in this section are not used by the leave pages. HR permissions apply to your company and the companies you have access to. System administrators have every permission, in every company.