--- title: "Leave" description: "Leave types and yearly balances, employee self-service requests, approval by someone else, paid holidays and a holiday calendar that feeds payroll." url: "https://bareledger.app/guides/leave" category: "Team, roles & approvals" updated: "2026-10-29" publisher: "BareLedger (Syneria Technologies OPC)" --- # Leave > Leave types and yearly balances, employee self-filing, maker-checker decisions, and the attendance board. **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](https://bareledger.app/guides/my-workspace). Find it under **People → Leave**; leave types and the holiday calendar live under **Settings → Leave**. ## How leave works 1. **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. 2. **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. 3. **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. 4. **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. 5. **Approving** debits the working days from the year's balance and paints those days as **Leave** on the attendance board ([Attendance & Timesheets](https://bareledger.app/guides/attendance)) — 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 ## Changing your mind - A **pending** request can be withdrawn by the employee (My Workspace) or cancelled by HR.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.