Planday offers the possibility of keeping track of your employees' absences, allowing them to request time off for a specific day or period. As a manager, you can receive a notification about the request and can take action immediately.

A fixed Absence account is an account with a stipulated amount of days or hours per year from which the employee deducts holidays. A fixed account does not accrue or earn holidays on an ongoing basis and is reset every year with options to carry over unused time. Follow this step-by-step guide on setting up fixed account templates and then apply them to your employees or employee groups.

💡 If you want to set up an Accrued account with the option to add an accruing rate per year, month, day, or in percentage, you can find an alternate setup guide for Accrued Absence accounts here.

Before you can start using the absence module, you need to create a leave account template to allocate holidays from.

Go to Settings > Leave & Overtime (or Absence, Overtime, Vacation) > Account templates > press the Create button.

Choose the Leave account (or Absence account)

Here you can set the details for your account template by following 3 steps. Below we show an example of how to complete the 3 steps when creating an Account for a fixed holiday.

Name: Set a name for your leave account such as Salaried vacation, Maternity leave, or similar. For example, you can set up a Fixed Absence account balance to indicate the maximum paid sick leave an employee is allowed to have and allocate days from it throughout the year. We recommend setting names without years so they can be utilized again.

Description: Here you can give your account a description if you want. (optional)

Renew automatically: We recommend 'Yes'. If you leave this unchecked the account will not be renewed automatically and you will need to manually create new accounts every year, when the old ones are out of date.

Accruing period: As this is a fixed account, set the date from when your company's vacation year starts and the duration of your vacation period.

Spending period - Annual start date: The spending period is when the employee is eligible to spend their assigned leave. This can be set as the same date the leave period starts.

Spending period: Set a deadline for up to many months the employees should be able to spend their vacation (1-52 months).

When you have filled your desired settings, press Next.

Accruing in: Under the Starting balance field, enter the value of days or hours per year. You can change this value for the specific employee. The starting balance as stated here will be the balance that can be seen on each employee's absence account each time a new consumption period starts.

Accruing rate: When creating a fixed holiday account, select "Do not use" under the Accruing rate.

Monetary payout: Select Do not use.

Employee types, Departments, and Employee groups: These options make it possible to limit which employees can use the specific vacation account you are creating. For example, if you only wish to use vacation in a specific department, you can limit access with this option.

Apply Automatically: If you select this option, the system will automatically apply this Account template for all new and existing employees who match the selected options.

💡 Please be aware of the allocations you set up in this section. The number of fixed holidays, accumulation period and spending period would automatically apply to the matching employees. However, these can be edited manually per employee should you need to make changes in the future or delete the allocations.

Negative balance: Select the checkbox if the employees should be able to request more days/hours than their existing balance. If you leave this unchecked the account will not allow a negative value. Ex. if one employee has a balance of 5 days and makes a request absence for 7 days, the employee cannot apply for time off in that period as the cost exceed the balance.

Max consecutive leave days (or Max consecutive absence days): Here you can set a restriction on the number of days off that can be taken in a row as leave. You can select "unlimited", which is the most common setting, or "set fixed limit". When selecting "unlimited", the administrator will still have to approve a holiday request and thus have the option to reject an extended holiday if necessary.

Carry over: Allow you to carry over days to the next period if you want to transfer any unused holidays/hours to the next holiday year. In this case, the system itself will create a new holiday account called "Carry over" when the consumption period is over. When Carry over is selected, you must specify how many days/hours a maximum can be transferred and if these days must have a different/fixed holding period. If the latter is left blank, the validity of the transfer account will be 12 months.

💡This point is very closely related to the Spending period point (see step 1 of 3). An example would be if your employees are allowed to carry over a maximum of 5 days into the new year and must also take them by March 1st, otherwise they will expire. In this example, you should leave the Spending period at 12 months and select the *Carry over* function. Please note that the carry over account is only created at the end of your period of use (usually January 1st). This account would then be valid until March 31st with 5 days of carryover balance.

Payroll: Here you can set up a Salary code for this leave template. These salary codes will be based on your payroll reports, for displaying detailed information on leaves, and help your Payroll integration modules understand the type of leave being reported.

Account priority: If you have more than one leave account and you want your employees to use one account before they can use another, you can adjust it here.

Bank holiday calendar: If your portal has a holiday calendar set up, it is possible to link the calendar to the vacation account. Once your bank holiday calendar is associated, it will affect the cost for created/requested vacation. For example, an employee has requested time off from Monday to Friday (5 days). If Tuesday is a bank holiday, the suggested cost will be 4 days instead of 5 days.

Default Shift type for overlapping shifts: You can select a Shift type here as a preselected option, which will make sure that, when approving Absence requests, the right Shift type will be pre-filled as the default Shift type.

Remember to press Save before exiting.

When an employee has requested time off and you have approved it, this will be marked in the schedule.
Approved time off does not prevent you from scheduling an employee, but their name will be marked in red in the employee selector. If you assign a Shift to an employee during their time off, you will notice a red icon on that shift letting you know that you need to adjust the Schedule.

If you want a day's vacation to be calculated automatically in relation to a weekday, you'll need to specify the working hours per month in an employee's individual details (from People > Employees > edit employee > Hrs per month).

If your employee does not have a fixed requirement for working hours per month or if they are hourly paid, we recommend entering '1' and saving.
This also applies if the vacation should be deducted from PDF and Salary reports that you wish to generate.
In this case, the employee should have a value set both for Monthly salary and Hrs per month.
You can also set a Monthly salary and Hrs per month value of 1 if needed.

Still, have questions? Reach out to our support team via chat if you need help regarding this feature.

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