Who can use this page: HR Officers file and manage, HR Managers (and the Accountant or an Administrator) decide. Employees file their own requests from My Workspace. Find it under People → Leave; leave types and the holiday calendar live under Settings → Leave.
How leave works
- Set up leave types (Settings → Leave): a code, a name, days per year, and whether it's paid. Vacation 15, Sick 10, Unpaid 0 is a typical start. A type with 0 days per year is unlimited — no balance is tracked, which is what you want for unpaid leave.
- Every employee gets the type's yearly days as their balance, automatically, per calendar year. Adjust an individual's entitlement on Settings → Leave (pick the employee) — for carry-overs, prorated first years, or special grants.
- Employees request leave from My Workspace: type, first and last day, optional reason. HR can also file on an employee's behalf from People → Leave — same rules.
- Someone else decides. Whoever filed a request can never approve or reject it — not even their own HR filing. Rejecting requires a comment, which the employee sees.
- Approving debits the working days from the year's balance and paints those days as Leave on the attendance board (Attendance & Timesheets) — so an approved absence never shows as absent.
What counts as a day
Only working days are charged: days with a shift on the employee's work schedule, or weekdays when they have no schedule. Rest days inside the span are free — a Monday-to-Sunday request on a Mon–Fri schedule costs 5 days, not 7.
A request is blocked up front when it would overdraw the balance, overlaps an existing pending/approved request, or contains no working days at all.
Changing your mind
- A pending request can be withdrawn by the employee (My Workspace) or cancelled by HR. Nothing was debited.
- An approved request can only be cancelled by someone who can approve leave — the balance is restored and the attendance board repainted.
- A rejected request is final; file a new one for different dates.
Leave and payroll
Leave itself posts nothing to the ledger. When payroll runs, it reads approved leave:
- Monthly-salaried staff: the salary already pays leave days, so nothing changes on the payslip.
- Daily- and hourly-paid staff: each approved day of a paid leave type is added as a Paid leave line, at a normal day's pay (an hourly worker gets their scheduled hours for the day). A half day pays half. Some countries value the day at average daily pay instead (for example New Zealand, and the UK for variable pay), which your country pack sets.
- Unpaid leave types pay nothing.
Holidays
The holiday calendar lives on Settings → Leave, under Holidays. Load standard holidays fills a year with your country's national holidays that follow a fixed rule (fixed dates, Easter-based days, "first Monday of…" days, substitute days for weekend holidays) — tick the ones you observe. Lunar, Islamic and yearly-proclaimed holidays (e.g. Eid, Chinese New Year, Philippine special days) can't be calculated in advance; the list says which to add by hand. You can also add any holiday yourself with its date, name and type. Picking a type fills in what your country's rules pay for it, and you can change the figures if company policy pays more:
Pay if not worked: percent of a day's pay that daily- and hourly-paid staff get for a holiday off on a scheduled workday (0 means no work, no pay — e.g. a Philippine special non-working day).
Total pay if worked: what anyone who works the holiday earns for the day (200 = double pay). Everything above 100% is added as a Holiday premium line, for monthly staff too.
Total pay if worked on a rest day: for a holiday that also falls on the employee's rest day (e.g. 260% for a Philippine regular holiday). Blank means the same as the worked figure.
A holiday can apply to every branch or just one (regional holidays). In the Philippines, a regular holiday off is only paid if the worker was at work, or on paid leave, on the workday before. If a holiday falls inside approved leave, the day is paid once, as the holiday.
Overtime and rest days
Payroll also pays premiums from the approved timesheet, at your country pack's rates:
- Overtime: time past the scheduled shift (or past 8 hours on a day with no shift). In the US it is time past 40 hours in a week; in Canada whichever of the daily or weekly rule gives more. On a holiday or rest day, overtime is paid on top of that day's rate (in the Philippines, +30% of the day's rate).
- Rest-day work: a day worked with no shift scheduled is paid at the rest-day rate (e.g. 130% in the Philippines). Monthly salaries don't cover rest days, so salaried staff get the whole rest-day rate for it.
- Exempt staff: tick Exempt from overtime and premium pay on the employee (managerial staff, or FLSA-exempt staff in the US) and none of these premiums are added.
Common mix-ups
- "I filed it and can't approve it." Correct — that's the maker-checker rule, the same control as everywhere else in BareLedger.
- "The weekend shows as Rest day, not Leave." Rest days aren't charged and aren't painted — only working days inside the span show as Leave.
- "The balance says not enough days." Check the year: balances are per calendar year, and the request is charged to the year of its first day. HR can raise an individual entitlement under Settings → Leave.