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ℹ️ Important read: Get to know Planday's leave management to find out which leave set-up fits your needs.

✅ Required steps: How to create and edit employees ; How to create or edit an employee group ; How to create or edit employee types.

Are you an employee? See How to apply for leave.

It is your responsibility to ensure compliance with the relevant rules for leave and to configure Planday to be suitable for the particular circumstances of your organisation and employees. If you are unsure, please obtain professional legal advice.

In Planday's leave setup, you can manage your employees' time off by setting up leave policies. A policy is a set of rules that determines accrual, pay, duration of leave etc. Apply these policies to your employees by creating individual leave accounts for them, enabling you to record their leave accurately.

What is a fixed leave (holiday) policy?

With a fixed leave policy, employees are given an opening leave balance at the start of the year. They do not accrue additional leave by working throughout the year. Instead, any leave taken is deducted from this fixed balance. In some cases, any remaining balance may be carried over to a new account.

Create a fixed leave (holiday) policy

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

If Planday offers leave suggestions for your region, you'll see a selection of predefined policies based on common scenarios and recommendations based on local labour rules.

Choose from one of the suggested policies (if available) or click "Create a custom policy" to set up your own rules.

If no suggestions are available for your region, you will be asked to select a type of policy you want to create.

Choose Leave policy (or Absence policy)

Step 1 of 3 — Set name and period

1. Policy details

Name: Choose a name for your leave policy, such as "Annual Leave" or "Sick Leave". It's recommended to use names without years for reusability.
Description: This is an optional field where you can add a description for the policy.

2. Accruing period

Accruing period: Start Date: This is the date when employees start accruing leave. For fixed accounts, match the date with the start of the Spending period below
Accruing period: Duration: Set the duration for how many months the accruing period should typically last, usually 12 months.
Renew automatically: It's recommended that you select this option. If unchecked, the account won't renew automatically, and you'll need to manually create new accounts each year.

3. Spending period

Spending Period - Start Date: This is when the employee becomes eligible to spend their earned leave. With a Fixed account, the entire amount of leave will be available for them to use and book leave for the duration of the spending period.
Spending Period - Duration: Set a deadline for how many months employees should be able to spend their leave (typically 12 months).

Once you've configured your desired settings, click Next.

Step 2 of 3 — Set start balance, accruing rate and monetary payout

1. Accrual policy

Accruing in: Select days or hours as your opening balance. This cannot be changed once the policy is created.
Opening balance: In this field, enter the value of days or hours per year. You can change this value for each specific employee. The opening balance mentioned here will be the initial balance visible on each employee's leave account at the beginning of a new holiday year.

If the 'Adjust the opening balance based on the hire date' option is enabled, the balance can be prorated according to the employee's hire date. See below Step 3 of 3 - Additional policy rules.

Accruing rate: For a fixed holiday account, choose Do not use.

2. Monetary payout

Monetary payout: Select Do not use.

3. Work hours per day (if the policy unit is in hours)

The option selected here determines how many hours will be deducted for a day's holiday. You can choose from the following options:
- Employee settings: The deduction is calculated by dividing the Hours per month (set in the employee’s profile) by the number of business days in the month if the "Business days" option is enabled, or by the shift duration if the "Timesheet hours" option is enabled.
- Previous X weeks: Planday will calculate the average of hours worked per day over the previous X weeks.
- A fixed rate: Manually set a fixed number of hours to be deducted for each day of leave in the leave policy.

The number of hours deducted for a day's holiday may also depend on other settings:

If a bank holiday calendar is attached to the policy, no hours will be deducted on a bank holiday.
Settings that only Planday Support can change:
- Business days: Hours will only be deducted if the requested day is a business day.
- Timesheet hours: Hours will only be deducted if the employee has scheduled shifts on the days they request leave.

Learn more about this in the FAQ: When an employee requests holiday or I request on their behalf, the amount of days or hours is 0. Why is it so?

Once you've configured your desired settings, click Next.

Step 3 of 3 — Additional policy rules

1. Employee types, Departments, and Employee groups

Use these options to control which employees can use the specific leave policy you're creating. For instance, if you only want leave available for a specific employee type, such as “salaried employees”.

2. Create automatically

When selected, the system automatically applies this leave policy to all new and existing employees matching the selected options and creates leave accounts for them.

3. Adjust the opening balance based on the hire date

When enabled, Planday automatically calculates adjustments, letting you update the opening balance as needed, to reflect the remaining leave entitlement based on employees' hire date. Learn more in Prorated fixed leave accounts.

When creating new fixed leave accounts, Planday will suggest adjusting the balance according to the employee's hire date, which can be set in their profile.

4. Negative balance

Check this box if employees should be able to request more days/hours than their existing balance. If unchecked, the account won't allow a negative value. For example, if an employee has a balance of 5 days and requests 7 days off, the policy won't allow it.

5. Consecutive leave days (or Consecutive absence days)

Set a restriction on the number of consecutive days off. You can choose Unlimited or set a fixed limit. If unlimited is selected, you can still approve or reject extended leave as a manager for each request.

6. Carry over

Allows you to transfer unused days to the next period. The policy creates a new leave account called “Carry over” at the end of the spending period. If Allow carry-over for the next period is selected, specify the maximum days/hours that can be transferred and if they must have a different/fixed holding period. Learn more in How to set up and manage carry-over leave.

This point closely relates to the Spending period (see step 1 of 3).
For example, If your Spending period starts in 1 April and lasts 12 months, employees will be able to use their 2023 leave entitlement from 1/4/2023 until 31/3/2024. With carryover set to max 5 days and limited till 30 June, employees will carryover their leftover balance (at most 5 days) on 31/3/2024 to their carryover account and will be able to use it until 30/6/2024.

7. Payroll

Set up a Salary code for this leave policy based on your payroll reports to display detailed information on leave and help Payroll integrations understand the reported leave type.

8. Account priority

Adjust if you have multiple leave accounts and want employees to use one before another.

9. Advanced details

Bank holiday calendar (or Public holiday calendar): Link a bank holiday calendar to the leave policy so public holidays don't count towards leave balances. For example, if an employee requests time off from Monday to Friday (5 days) and Tuesday is a bank holiday, the suggested cost will be 4 days instead of 5 days.
Default Shift type for overlapping shifts: Choose a shift type you would like to apply to existing shifts scheduled during the employee's requested time off. Typically a shift type that is used to mark employee's absence.

Remember to press Save to create your leave policy.

Create leave accounts for your employees

See related articles:

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