As an employer, there may be instances when you need to make adjustments to an employee's time-off balance. This could be for a variety of reasons, such as providing an employee with an extra day off as an incentive, making changes to your time off policy, or correcting an error. With Connecteam you can handle these adjustments with transparency and communicate clearly with your employees to avoid any confusion or disputes.
Adjusting an employee's time off balance can be done from the dashboard and requires managers to have specific admin permissions. You can refer to the Admin Permissions article for more information (link). Any changes made to the time off balance will be visible to employees through their mobile app or web browser, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Below are the ways to change the time-off balance:
From the user’s profile, for one employee at a time.
From the policy itself, where you can edit the balance of every assigned employee, set it as a total or as a breakdown, and import balances from a file.
In bulk, for several employees at once.
Changing the Time off Balance from the User Profile
Increase or decrease the balance of a specific time off policy for an individual employee from his profile page. Follow these steps:
Simply navigate to the Users tab in the left sidebar.
Search for the user and click on their profile.
Click on the time off section tab.
Select the policy whose balance you want to change and click the Edit Balance button. After you enter the updated balance press confirm changes.
Tip: You can access an employee's profile from the Approved Time Off tab with just a few clicks. Simply hover over the employee profile photo, and click on Profile. This will easily transfer you to the user's profile.
Changing the Time Off Balance Within the Policy Itself
Once a time-off policy has been created, it will be displayed on the top page of the time-off feature. To edit the policy, simply click on the three dots button located next to it and select "Edit Policy." This will take you to the next step where you can view a list of all users who are currently assigned to the policy along with their current balance. From this page, you can make any necessary changes to the balance for each user assigned to that policy.
Setting Balances as a Total or as a Breakdown
When you edit the balances of a policy, you choose how to enter each employee’s balance:
Total: Enter one balance per employee.
Breakdown: Enter the Carryover, Accrued, and Used amounts separately. Connecteam calculates the total balance from these three values (Carryover + Accrued - Used).
The Breakdown option is useful when you need to correct only one part of an employee’s balance, for example the carryover from the previous year, without recalculating the total by hand.
To set balances by breakdown, follow these steps:
From the left sidebar, select Time Off.
Click the three dots next to the relevant policy and select Edit balances.
Next to Edit balance by, select Breakdown.
Enter the Carryover, Accrued, and Used amounts for each employee.
Review the Total column.
Click Save.
A few things to keep in mind when you use the breakdown:
Carryover can be a negative number. Accrued and Used cannot.
Used cannot be lower than the time off the employee has already used through approved requests. If you enter a lower number, the row shows the minimum allowed amount.
Rows you changed are marked as modified, and you can reset a row to its original values before saving.
💡 Tip: If a policy has an accrual waiting period or carryover that is about to expire, hover over the marked field to see how it affects the employee’s total.
Import Balances From a File
Instead of updating employees one by one, you can import balances for all employees assigned to a policy from a CSV or XLSX file. You can import either the current total balance or the full Carryover, Accrued, and Used breakdown, and you choose how employees are identified in the file. Before anything is saved, you review the imported numbers and resolve any employee who could not be matched.
To import balances, follow these steps:
From the left sidebar, select Time Off.
Click the three dots next to the relevant policy and select Import balances.
Under What balance data would you like to import?, select Current balance only or Carryover, accrued, and used amounts.
Current balance only - Import one total balance per user
Carryover, accrued, and used amounts - Import a full breakdown of each user’s balance.
Under How should we identify employees?, select the field your file uses to identify employees: Full name, User ID, Phone number, Email, or one of your company’s text, number, phone, or email user fields.
Review the template preview, then click Next.
Click Download template and fill it in with a balance for each employee.
Save the file as CSV or XLSX, keeping the column headers exactly as they appear in the template.
Click Next and upload the file.
If some employees could not be matched, resolve each one on the review screen: select the correct Connecteam user, or exclude the row from the import.
Click Import.
Review the balances on the Edit balances screen, then click Save.
Importing fills in the balances on the Edit balances screen as ordinary edits. Nothing changes for your employees until you click Save, and you can edit or reset any row before then.
Empty Cells
Choose what happens to empty cells in your file:
Keep the current balance: Empty cells are skipped and the employee’s existing value stays as it is. This lets you import only the amounts you want to change.
Treat empty cells as zero: Empty cells are imported as 0.
Why a File Can Be Rejected
The upload is rejected, and you can choose another file, when:
The file is not a CSV or XLSX file, or cannot be read.
One or more template columns are missing.
The file has no data rows.
The same employee appears more than once.
A User ID cell contains something other than digits.
A balance is not a plain number. Use a period for decimals (1.5, not 1,5).
A balance is negative where negatives are not allowed. Total balance and Carryover can be negative. Accrued and Used cannot.
The error message lists the affected row numbers so you can fix them in your file.
💡 Tip: Match employees by User ID or Email for the most reliable results. When you match by phone number, include the country code, because numbers without it cannot be matched automatically.
Employees With Locked Balances
When a policy uses mid-cycle accrual and the system enforces the starting balance, those balances are locked. The import button is disabled while any balance in the policy is locked, and locked rows keep their enforced value.
Adjusting Balances for Multiple Users at Once
When you need to correct or update balances across a team, you can adjust the balance for several users in a single action instead of editing each profile one by one. Bulk balance actions are performed for one policy type at a time, so your update always applies to the right Time Off policy.
Adjust Balances in Bulk
From the left sidebar, select Time Off.
Select the policy whose balances you want to adjust.
Select the users you want to update (use the top checkbox to select all).
Click Actions, then select Adjust balance.
Choose how to apply the change:
Set replaces each selected user’s balance with the amount you enter.
Add increases each user’s current balance by the amount you enter.
Deduct decreases each user’s current balance by the amount you enter.
Enter the amount and choose the unit (days or hours).
Add a note if you want to record the reason for the change.
Review the preview of each user’s updated balance, then click Save.
💡 Tip: Users who are on an unlimited policy within the selected policy type are not included in a bulk balance action, since there is no balance to change for them.
Grant Time Off in Bulk
You can also grant a set amount of time off to several users at once for a specific policy.
From the left sidebar, select Time Off.
Select the relevant policy.
Select the users you want to grant time off to.
Click Actions, then select Grant time off.
Enter the amount and choose the unit (days or hours).
Add a note if needed.
Review the per-user preview, then click Save.
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