Entitlements are calculated, not typed
When an employee is created, the system derives their leave entitlement for the current year from their join date, seniority level and — for childcare leave — the ages of their children. A person who joins in September does not get a full year of annual leave; they get the pro-rated share, rounded to the nearest half day.
The same calculation runs again each year, and it backfills. If you add a new leave type in March, everyone who already has entitlement rows for that year gets the new type reconciled in on their next page load rather than needing a manual sweep.
Where the calculation is wrong for a specific person — a negotiated contract, a transferred balance from a previous system — an admin sets an override for that employee, leave type and year. Overrides win over the calculation and survive recalculation. Every override records who set it and why.
Day counting
A leave application spanning a week is not five days if there is a public holiday in it. The system counts working days by walking the date range, skipping Saturdays and Sundays, and skipping any date present in the gazetted public holiday table. The employee sees the excluded dates listed on the apply form *before* they submit, so there is no argument later about what was deducted.
Approval routing
Each employee has one or more approvers. You can set them explicitly per person, or fall back to the reporting line. When an application is submitted, the approvers receive an email containing the request details and two signed one-click links — approve or reject.
Those links carry a single-use, time-limited token. An approver can act on a request from their phone without signing in, which is the difference between leave being approved the same day and leave sitting in a queue for a week. The token is consumed on use, so a forwarded email cannot be replayed.
Medical leave and documents
Leave types can be marked as requiring a document. Medical leave and hospitalisation leave are configured that way out of the box: the employee attaches the MC when applying, or uploads it afterwards from the dedicated MC page. Approvers see the attachment inline when reviewing.
Visibility
- Team calendar — a month view of who is out and when, so nobody books three people off the same Friday by accident.
- Personal history — every application an employee has made, with its status, reviewer and comment.
- Balance breakdown — entitlement, carried forward, adjustments and used, shown separately rather than collapsed into one number.
- Calendar export — approved leave can be exported as an
.icsfile and subscribed to from Google Calendar or Outlook. - Admin report — leave taken across the whole company for a year, exportable for your own records.
Corrections leave a trail
Balances get corrected — someone was migrated in with the wrong opening figure, or a cancelled trip needs days returned. Every manual adjustment is written to a separate audit table recording the amount, the reason, who made it and when. The balance itself stays a single number; the history behind it stays intact.