Leave
A leave management system whose balances actually reconcile
Your leave types, your rules, your holiday calendar. Working days counted from each employee's own shift — and a balance that moves exactly once, no matter how many times somebody clicks.
What you get
Everything this module does
Leave types you define
Name, colour, days per year, half-day allowed or not, carry-forward with a cap, negative balances permitted or not, document required or not. Casual, sick and earned are seeded on day one; the rest is yours.
Working days, computed
Apply for the 12th to the 18th and the server works out what that costs — skipping weekends according to that employee's own shift, and skipping your company's holidays.
Apply, approve, reject, cancel
Balance is deducted on approval and returned on cancellation. Either party can cancel and the other is notified. Rejections carry the approver's comment, shown to the employee verbatim.
Balances that cannot double-spend
Balance rows are locked on apply and on approve. Two approvers acting at the same second, or one impatient double-click, cannot spend the same day twice.
Half-days
Where the leave type allows it, and counted as half in every report and in the export — not rounded up to keep the arithmetic simple.
Apply on behalf
HR files and approves in one step for staff who phoned in, with that employee's own remaining balance shown inline before it is submitted.
Holiday calendar
Per company, with optional holidays marked optional. The same calendar drives leave counting, the muster roll and the absence counter, so they cannot disagree.
Retire, don't delete
A leave type you have stopped offering is retired rather than deleted, so last year's approved leave still makes sense when you look at it next year.
A guarded cancellation
An approver cannot approve their own leave, let it run, and then refund themselves the balance afterwards. The system refuses.
The problem
Leave goes wrong quietly, and then all at once in March.
Leave tracking usually starts as a shared spreadsheet, and for a while it works. It breaks at the edges: a sandwich weekend that someone counted and someone else did not, a public holiday inside a five-day leave, an employee on a six-day week whose Saturday is a working day when everyone assumed it was not, a half-day rounded up because the column only took whole numbers.
None of these are noticed when they happen. They are noticed at the end of the leave year, when balances are reconciled and four people are each short a day and a half, and nobody can reconstruct which of the eleven months the error came from.
AMS removes the arithmetic from the humans. The server computes the working days for a request from that employee's own shift and your holiday list, deducts on approval, restores on cancellation, and keeps the whole movement traceable. The balance on screen is derived, never a number somebody typed.
The balance is visible before the request is made
The apply form shows what is left of the selected leave type as you pick it, so people stop applying for days they do not have and HR stops rejecting requests that should never have been raised. Where a type requires a document, the form says so up front.
Rules AMS enforces so you do not have to police them
- Weekends skipped according to that employee's shift, not a company default
- Company holidays excluded from the days counted
- Carry-forward capped at whatever number you set
- Negative balances allowed only where you permit them
- Documents demanded by the leave types that require them
- The leave year starting in the month your policy starts in
- An approver blocked from refunding their own taken leave
- Retired leave types kept readable in historical records
Questions
Frequently asked
Can we define our own leave types?
Yes — entirely. Name, colour, days per year, half-day, carry-forward and its cap, negative balance, and whether a document is required. New companies start with Casual, Sick and Earned seeded so the module works on day one, and you change those or replace them.
Does it handle multi-level approvals?
Not yet. Today approval is single-level: the request goes to the approvers who hold the permission. Multi-level chains with timeouts and auto-escalation are designed but deliberately not shipped, because a half-built escalation that silently drops a request is worse than none.
Does leave accrue monthly, or is it granted once a year?
Today it is an annual grant. Monthly accrual, per-employee probation and compensatory off are fully designed and are the next module we build — as a ledger where every movement is a line you can show someone, rather than a running total nobody can explain.
What happens to a holiday that falls inside somebody's leave?
It is not counted against their balance. The server excludes holidays and that employee's own week-offs when it works out what the request costs.
Can HR apply for leave on an employee's behalf?
Yes. HR files and approves in one step, which is what actually happens when somebody phones in sick. The employee's remaining balance is shown inline before it is submitted, and the record shows HR filed it.
Do approvals send an email?
Notifications are in-app today — a bell with an unread count — and email for leave events is on the roadmap. Invites and password resets do go out by email. We list the two separately because conflating them would misrepresent what a manager will actually receive.
Keep reading
Next step
See it on your own roster
A working demo takes about twenty minutes, and we will use your shifts and your week-offs rather than a sample company.