The Time Off feature helps you manage everything related to employee leave in a way that is accessible and transparent to employees and managers. When creating Limited Time Off Policies, you must set your employee's starting balances. You may wonder what a balance is and why it must be set individually. Let's dive into it.
What is an Employee Balance?
Since you created a limited time off policy the amount of time accrued by employees is limited. For example, each employee gets 20 days a year, or each employee earns 1 hour for every 8 hours worked. In this case, each employee maintains a balance from which they can request time off. If an employee has a balance of 4 days it means that is the amount of time off they have earned at the moment. If an employee has a balance of -2 it means they have taken more time off than they have accrued.
💡Tip: When your employee requests time off it may appear that they would enter into a negative balance, however, you should consider if they will be accruing additional time before the date of their time off. This is especially important to consider if your company policy does not allow employees to enter a negative balance. For example, my employees receive 20 days a year. It is currently January and they have 0 days. They request 4 days in May. It may appear that they will enter a negative balance if I approve the time off now. However, in reality, the employee with accrue 6.6 days between now and May.
Why Do I Have to Set Each Balance One by One?
The reason you need to set each employee's balance one by one is because most employees do not have the same balance. After all, employees start at different times and take different amounts of time off, resulting in a unique balance for each one. Let's look at an example. My company gives 20 days of holiday a year and can carry over 5 days to the next year.
Jenny has worked for the company for 6 months. So far she has taken no vacation. This means that her current balance is 10 days.
Carlee joined the company 4 months ago. So far she has taken and taken 10 vacation days. This means her current balance is -3.32 days.
Sarah has worked for the company for over a year. She carried over 5 days. Currently, it is July. So far this year he has taken 2 days off. Her current balance is 13 days.
As you can see each person maintains a different balance. For this reason, you must set each employee's balance individually, when creating any limited time off policy. We recommend you arrive with this list of employees' current balances before setting up your time off policies.
Do you need to update or change an employee's balance? Check out this article.
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