To understand how employees can submit their time off requests, it's important to note that if you approve a time off request for the next calendar or fiscal year while still in the current one, the hours will be deducted from the current year's balance, not the next year's. Therefore, there are two possible ways for employees to submit their time off for the next year—let's review each of them:
Option 1: Ask Employees to Wait
The first option is to ask users to wait until the next year to submit their time off requests. This approach helps prevent errors and ensures that requests are not mistakenly approved by an admin before the new year begins. Once the new calendar or fiscal year starts and the user's policy balance resets, they can submit their requests for that year, and the admin can approve them, ensuring the hours are deducted from the correct period.
Option 2: Keep a Record and Only Review It Next Year
The second option is to allow users to submit their time off requests but keep them pending approval until the next year. When the new calendar or fiscal year begins, you can review and choose to approve or decline these requests, ensuring the hours are deducted from the correct period.
If your company prioritizes time off based on the order of submission, this option is beneficial because it maintains a clear record of when each request was sent. This way, when it's time to approve or decline requests, you'll know which employees should be prioritized.
You can do this by:
Creating a new temporary policy for next year:
You can create a new policy titled "2025 Requests", for example, and instruct employees to select this policy when submitting their requests for the next year. This will help you identify which requests should remain pending. When the new year arrives, review these requests. For the requests you wish to approve, instead of approving them directly, manually add the time off to the employee's actual policy.
It’s important to manually add the requests rather than approve them directly because the plan is to delete the temporary policy once you’ve finished reviewing it. If you simply approve the requests and then delete the policy, those requests will also be deleted. Once you’re done, you can safely delete the temporary policy you created.
Using a form:
You can create a form titled "2025 Requests", for example, and ask employees to submit their time off requests for the next year through this form. This will help you maintain a clear record of the requests. When the new year arrives, review the form entries, and for the requests you wish to approve, manually add the time off to the employee’s policy.
Please note: If an employee has a time off request that spans two different fiscal years, ask them to submit two separate requests. For example, instead of sending one request from December 20 to January 5, they should send one request for December 20 to December 31 and a second request for January 1 to January 5.
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