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.

An Accrued absence account (or Accrued leave if you have selected UK English as your portal language) is a holiday allowance where the number of days or hours are earned over time. In some cases, there is a starting balance of days that can be used.

Most accrued Absence accounts build up holidays based on an earning rate that is regulated by the local government following labour laws. The account is reset after a period with options to carry over unused time.

Follow this step-by-step guide on setting up an accrued absence account template and then apply it to your employees or employee groups.

💡If you want to set up a Fixed absence account where employees have a set number of days or hours that they can request off, you can find an alternate setup guide for Fixed Absence accounts here.

⚠️ If you are already using Planday’s old absence module (pre-November 2021), and you want to switch to using the new Accrued Absence accounts, you can follow the step-by-step guide for Transitioning to the new accrued Absence accounts.

Before you can start using the absence module, you need to create an 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 the 3 steps below.

Name: Set a name for your leave account such as Earned vacation, Holiday leave, or similar. We recommend setting names without years so they can be utilized again.

Description: Optional field to add a description for the account.

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will not be renewed automatically and you will need to manually create new accounts every year, when the old ones are out of date.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 - Annual start date: Accruing period is the duration in which the absence is accumulated. Set a date from which the account should start accumulating leave.

Accruing period - Duration: Set how many months the accruing period should be typically 12 months.

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

Spending period - Duration: Set a deadline for upto 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: Choose if the accruing should be in Days or Hours.

Start balance: you have the option to set a start balance for the account template. This value will be the start balance on all accounts both now and in the future. The start balance can later be overwritten in your employee's individual accounts for each period.

Accruing rate:
- For Days choose between “Percentage”, “Days per month” or “Days per year”.
- For Hours choose between “Percentage”, “Hours per day” or “Hours per month”.
- For Days or Hours per day/month/year: enter the number that fits your country.
- For Percentage, here are some commonly used rates:
12,07 % rate calculated based on days off per year: 28 days
12,55 % rate calculated based on days off per year: 29 days
13,04 % rate calculated based on days off per year: 30 days
13,54 % rate calculated based on days off per year: 31 days
14,04 % rate calculated based on days off per year: 32 days
14,54 % rate calculated based on days off per year: 33 days

Use this handy tool from Gov.UK to calculate various holiday entitlements.

Max allowance / CAP: Choose between “Days per Month”, “Days per Year”, “Hours per Day” or “Hours per month“ and enter the maximum allowed earnings per the period you have chosen. Leave blank for unlimited.

Requirements for accrual: (only available if the account has an accrual rate per day/month/year.) Choose if the requirements for accrual should always accrue, or depend on approved shifts in the schedule.

Shift types: Select the applicable shift types that should count towards the accrual. These can be normal shifts, overtime and may exclude sick days or no-shows depending on your company’s policies.

Monetary payout: Choose if the payout of vacation should be based on an average of 12, 13 or 52 weeks, or set a fixed rate. Select Do not use if this does not apply to your region.

When you have filled your desired settings, press Next.

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 accumulation rate, 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 for 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.

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

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