Setting up and managing vacation balances

Modified on: Mon, 28 Apr, 2025 at 12:26 PM

INNEHÅLLSFÖRTECKNING

Intro
Setup
- Setting up vacation policies
How does it work?
Any Questions?

Intro

Vacation balance is a simple way to keep track of how many vacation days your employees has earned, award days continually based on a vacation policy and update employees' vacation balance when vacation days are spent. Employees see their earned vacation days, managers view their team’s vacation days and it’s also included information in the process of requesting and approving vacation.

Setup

The absence administrator works with creating the vacation policies and assigning those to employees.

Setting up vacation policies

As an administrator, you access the menu item “Vacation policies” under Settings. Here you get an overview of all the vacation policies that are already created in your organization

To create a new vacation policy, click “New policy”.

In the modal that pops up next, you will make settings for your vacation policy which aligns with your country’s legislation and your organization’s way of managing vacation.

Creating a monthly vacation policy

If you use monthly earning and awarding of vacation days, this is how you set it up:

Add a name that will describe the policy, e.g. “Standard policy 25 days”.
Set the start date of the vacation year that should be used for this policy
Select the number of annual vacation days, e.g. 25
Set awarding frequency to monthly.
Select if new days should be awarded the last day of the month or first day of the month.
Select when vacation days from previous period will expire. Set the number of years after start date of earning year and an expiry date, for example 1 year after earning period and 31st of December. Your settings here will give you a guiding example to help you.
Select whether newest or oldest vacation days is to be used first.
When you’re done with your settings, click Save.

Creating a yearly vacation policy

If you use yearly earning and awarding of vacation days, this is how you set it up:

Add a name that will describe the policy, e.g. “Standard policy 25 days”.
Set the start date of the vacation year that should be used for this policy
Select the number of annual vacation days, e.g. 25
Set awarding frequency to yearly.
Select if awarding should happen in advance or after earning.
Select date to award vacation days, on start date of vacation year or a custom date you select yourself.
Set rules for carryover. Specify the number of days that are allowed to be carried over from one year to the next, how many years they can be saved and what date they should expire. Your settings here will give you a guiding example to help you.
Select whether newest or oldest vacation days is to be used first.
When you’re done with your settings, click Save.

Example of policy with monthly earning

This is an example of a policy set up, for example applied to the Danish regulation.

The vacation year spans from September 1 to August 31. The number of vacation days per days are 25, but you’re free to pick another amount. You see in the blue box how many days those days translate into on a monthly and daily basis. The earning is monthly and the awardance happens monthly on the first day of the month. The rules for carryover is set to 1 year after earning period starts on December 31, which means for example that days earned between September 01 2025 and August 31 2026 must be used before December 31 2026. The oldest vacation is used first and then new vacation, since you between September 01 and December 31 on a given year might have days from previous period as well as days from the current period.

This policy will result in the following:

Example of policy with yearly earning

This is an example of a yearly policy set up, that could for example be used in Sweden.

The vacation year spans from April 1 to March 31. The number of vacation days are 25, but you’re free to pick another amount. The earning is yearly and the awardance happens yearly when a new vacation period starts. The rules for carryover are set to 5 days that will expire 5 years after earning period starts on March 31, which means for example that days earned between April 01 2025 and March 31 2026 must be used before March 31 2031. The most recent earned vacation from current vacation period will be used first, then saved vacation from newest to oldest.

This policy will result in the following:

How to onboard into the solution

No matter where you’re coming from today in terms of where you keep track of vacation days, your employees already have earned vacation days that you need to move into the system for a correct starting point. We suggest the following process (and you can read more about each of the steps below):

Decide in advance on a date when you will move into the new solution. Depending on when your vacation year starts and how your employees earn vacation, there will be different points in time that makes sense to transition.
Create your policies according to your needs so they are ready in the system.
Assign policies to the right employees with the right start date (some time in the future).
When the start date has passed and the policy is active, employees will be able to see their balance in Time & Absence.
You can add any already earned vacation days to employees manually to make the balance correct, and when doing this you need to select to which vacation period they belong so they’ll expire at the right time.
When all above is done, employees will see the right balance in Time & Absence.

What happens with vacation days that have been requested in the future when a vacation policy is assigned and active?

All v

INNEHÅLLSFÖRTECKNING

Intro
Setup
Any Questions?

acation days in the future will be detracted from the current balance when a policy is assigned to an employee.

Example: An employee during February requests 10 days of vacation days during July, which the manager approves. A new vacation policy is assigned in February stating that the employee earns 25 vacation days yearly in advance starting 1st of March. The policy is assigned and starts in February.

In February, the employee will have a balance of -10 vacation days. (10 days are taken off the balance but no days have been awarded yet.)

1st of March the yearly vacation days are awarded, resulting in a balance of 15 vacation days.

How does it work?

Assigning vacation policies to employees

When you have set up your policies according to your needs, you’re all set to start assigning them to your employees. You can have your employees run on different vacation policies for example if some employees are entitled to more vacation days, all you need to do is to set up policies with different settings and assign them to the right employees.

Go to People under Administration in Time & Absence.
Select the employee(s) you want to assign a policy to. You can select one or many employees in the list.
Click “Assign vacation policy” in the menu that pops up.
In the next step, you will select the vacation policy you want to assign and you will also set a date for when the policy should start. This means that the employee will start earning vacation according to the rules you set up in the policy from this date. You can choose to have the policy start from today, but you’re also able to pick a date in future.
Click “Yes, assign policy” to assign.
Now you will see in the People list that these employees have this policy assigned. If employees have a policy assigned in future, this is indicated with an information symbol and when hovering you’ll see when it’s about to start.

Overviewing vacation balance for all employees

The administrator can overview vacation balance for all employees in the People list.

Following changes in vacation balance for an employee

The employee, the manager and an administrator can follow changes to a specific employee’s vacation balance by looking at a vacation log for each employee. Here, any event affecting the balance will show, such as when days are automatically awarded from the vacation policy, vacation requests taking days off the balance and manual adjustments.

In the list you can see the type, when, the change (adding or detracting days), the new balance after the change and what vacation period balance was affected by the change. For manual updates, it is also possible to add a comment which can be shown here as well.

Editing vacation balance for an employee

If you want to change the vacation balance for an employee, this is how you do it:

Go to the People list
Click the three dots to the right and select “Edit vacation balance”
In the next step, you’ll select what vacation period you’re editing balance for and adjust the balance. You’re also able to add a comment to the change which will show in the employee’s balance log.
Click “Save”.
Your changes are now visible in the list of current balance for the employee.

Change and remove vacation policies for employees

If employees should run on another vacation policy or you want to remove the policy for some reason, this can be done.

Change vacation policy

If there is already a vacation policy assigned to an employee, you can still assign a new policy to that employee by following the steps described for how to assign policies to employees.

Please note that this will remove current vacation balance for this employee. If you want to transfer vacation days into the new policy, that can be done manually by editing balance for that employee when on the new policy.

Remove vacation policy

You can remove a vacation policy for an employee. Find the employee you want to remove policy for, click the three dots to the right and select “Remove vacation policy”. This will remove current balance for an employee.