Setting up time off

Time off needs configuring before anyone can request anything. An HR admin does this once, at People → Time off → Configure leave types, policies and holidays, or directly at /people/leave/setup.

The steps depend on each other, so do them in order.

Starting from a template

If you are setting this up for the first time, Browse starter setups offers three ready-made configurations — a UK standard, a US standard, and a minimal one with a single holiday type. Applying one creates ordinary leave types and policies you can edit; nothing is fixed afterwards and there is no link back to the preset.

They are a starting point, not advice. Entitlements differ by country, contract and company, and none of this has been checked against anybody's employment law. Applying twice will not duplicate anything: a type or policy whose name already exists is left alone and reported back to you.

Entitlements in the presets are expressed in hours, which is what Time Trakkr stores. The day equivalents shown alongside assume the preset's own working day.

1. Leave types

A leave type is a kind of absence: Holiday, Sick, Unpaid, Parental. Nobody can request time off until at least one exists.

Each type has two settings:

• Paid — whether the absence is paid. Recorded for your reporting; it does not change the hours.
• Needs approval — when unticked, requests of that type are approved on submission and the hours are deducted immediately. Useful for something like a duvet day; leave it ticked for anything a manager should see first.

Types can be renamed at any time. A type can only be deleted while nothing depends on it — once there are requests or balances against it, deleting would make real entitlement disappear from people's balances while it was still owed, so the app refuses and suggests renaming instead.

2. Policies

A policy says how much someone accrues on a given leave type.

Entitlement is in hours, not days. Days are ambiguous the moment anyone works a four-day week, and mixing the two is how balances end up wrong in ways nobody can reconstruct. The form shows the day equivalent as you type — 160 hours is 20 days at 8 hours.

• Accrual — Monthly credits a twelfth of the annual entitlement each month; Annual credits the whole amount at the start of the leave year; None means you adjust balances by hand.
• Entitlement by tenure — the "20 days, rising to 25 after two years" case. Band one is the starting entitlement; add bands for later ones.
• Carryover cap and expires after — how much unused leave rolls into the next year, and how long it survives.
• Leave year starts — the month your leave year begins.
• Allow going into a negative balance — when unticked, a request that exceeds someone's remaining balance is refused.

Editing a policy affects future accrual only. Entries already posted stand: they are what someone actually accrued at the time, and rewriting them would change balances people may already have spent against.

3. Put people on a policy

Assign each person to a policy, optionally with a holiday calendar and their working day in hours.

The panel names anyone who is not on a policy. This matters more than it looks: an unassigned person accrues nothing and sees a zero balance with no error to explain it, which is indistinguishable from having used all their leave.

A policy cannot be deleted while people are on it — that would stop their accrual with no trace.

4. Holiday calendars

Leave costing skips public holidays. Without a calendar, somebody taking Christmas week is charged for the bank holidays too.

1. Choose a country. The calendar name fills in from it and stays editable, so "UK — London office" is fine.
2. Pick a year and select Fetch holidays.

The dates land in the paste box rather than being saved directly, so you can review and edit them first — the source dataset is community-maintained and can lag a change in law.

Only nationwide public holidays are imported. Observances, school and optional days are left out because they are not days the office closes, and importing them would make leave cost fewer hours than it should. Region-only holidays are excluded too, so a US calendar does not collect every state's holidays.

You can also paste dates by hand, one per line as YYYY-MM-DD, Name. Lines that cannot be read are reported rather than skipped silently — a missing holiday does not fail loudly, it just quietly costs somebody a day of leave. Re-pasting the same dates is harmless.

Adjusting a balance

Use Adjust a balance for opening balances when you migrate, goodwill days, or a correction. It posts an entry to the ledger rather than overwriting a total, so a balance can always be explained by the entries behind it. A reason is required, because an unexplained adjustment is indistinguishable from a bug six months later. Negative hours take time away.