How to reconfigure time off settings and incorrect balances

Symptoms

• Employees are accruing holiday days unexpectedly (e.g. weekly or monthly)
• It’s the beginning of a new holiday a year and employees didn’t get the number of days you expected
• People’s holiday balances are not what you expected, perhaps because of previous misconfigurations or manual adjustments.

Overview

This has probably happened because your time off settings were not set correctly.

In this guide, we’re going to explain:

• How to check what settings and holiday allowances you actually have
• How to correct them so that it works automatically next year
• How to update employees’ balances now so that they have the right allowances this year

Check your default time off settings

First, go to the time off settings page:

1. Log in as the admin user
2. Select Time off on the Settings menu
3. There are normally five different ‘configs’ available. For example, you can have one config for full time employees, another for part-timers and another for executives.
4. Check each config in turn

Then, check each config in turn:

1. Are they getting the right number of days per year?
2. Do you allow them to ‘overdraw’ or ‘borrow’ holiday days if they don’t have enough?
3. Check the start date for the holiday year.
4. Do you have the right accrual method? If you want people to get all their days on the first day of the holiday year, select annual (this is usually best). Otherwise select monthly (in which case they get 1/12th of their annual allowance every month) or weekly (in which case they get 1/52nd of their allowance every week).
5. Look at “At the end of the year [RESET / ROLLOVER] time off days”. If you were expecting your users’ days to rollover, make sure it says ‘Rollover’. If you were expecting your users’ days to be zero at the beginning of the year, change it to ‘Reset’
6. Click Save config
7. IMPORTANT NOTE. This only changes the settings for the future, i.e. the end of the next holiday year or for users with weekly or monthly accruals. Also, it only affects users who share these default settings. It doesn't change anything retrospectively.

Make sure everyone has the right time off config

1. Log in as an admin user
2. Click on Employees to see a list of all your staff
3. Select each employee in turn
4. Click on Statistics
5. On the statistics page, it shows the current config right under ‘Statistics for [Name]’
6. To change the config, just click on the current config and select the required config from the list
7. IMPORTANT NOTE. Changing a user's config only affects what happens in the future. For example, it doesn't make any retrospective changes to the employee's holiday balance.

Checking an employee's time off history

You can check exactly what’s happened to an employee’s time off balance using the statistics page.

1. Log in as an admin user
2. Click on Employees to see a list of all your staff
3. Select each employee in turn
4. Click on Statistics
5. On this page you can see a summary of that user's time off. At the top, it shows days on balance, taken, approved and pending as well as the number of days that are available for booking. NOTE: You can click on any of these numbers to jump to a list of requests that make up that total. Below that you can see non-holiday time offs that have actually been taken - future requests are not shown here. 
6. Finally, at the bottom of the page, you can see a time off history which is a bit like a holiday bank account, showing deposits (eg annual, monthly or weekly accruals) and withdrawals (eg holidays actually taken). You can click on any underlined request number to see the details of that request.

Adding or subtracting holiday days

You may need to add or subtract days 'on balance' to correct for configuration mistakes or as part of routine operations, for example to give time off in lieu.