Create a template Absence account

Create Absence accounts for your employees

Create Absence requests

Act on Absence requests

Accruing in: Choose if the accruing should be in Days or Hours.

Start balance: The value will be the opening balance for all accounts you create and will create in the future. For example, enter 30 days as the start balance and leave the settings for accruing rate and Max. allowance/CAP at 0. Then the account will behave exactly like a fixed leave account. You can still calculate the payroll cost of the leave, and also use the carryover to the next leave year.

The initial balance can be overwritten later in the individual accounts of your employees for each period.

Under accruing rate, you set the ratio for accrual of vacation days per work period:

set the max. allowance for the number of vacation days an employee can accrue per month or per year. If you don't want to set a maximum limit, simply leave the field empty.
If you set the template to accrue in hours, then the maximum allowance will also have to be set for hours

choose if the requirements for accrual should be based on only the accrual rate, or depend on approved shifts in the schedule. Only if the account has an accrual rate per day/month/year.

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.

choose how the monetary payout should be calculated for your employees. Previous 13 weeks is an option that’s recommended for Germany. You can read more about Germany Accrued vacation: Leave pay and calculations here.

⚠️ Please, keep in mind that if your chosen method gives you a value inferior to the one that the previous 13 weeks calculation would give you, you would not necessarily be compliant with the German government vacation act.

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.

Create automatically: If you select this, the system will automatically create this account 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.

Here you can find instructions on how to manually create an account for an employee.

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.

💡According to the German regulations the employees might be granted allowance to carry over 5 days that need to be used before the 31st of March.

💡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 type. 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.

Priority: If you have more than one account and you want your employees to use one leave account type 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.

which date will mark the start of the accruing period (if the employee joined after the start of the accruing period in your organization, it should be set to that employee's hired date)

you can add a Bank Holiday calendar to the account (if days from a specific holiday calendar should not be deducted from your employee’s account when they request holiday on these days.)

if you are setting this up after the accruing period and the spending period have started, there might be situations in which an employee has already accumulated vacation days or has already been on vacation for a few days. You should those details in the Start balance section.

if you've configured the Carry over setting for the template account (see above), the carry over amount will reflect the number of days you've already allowed.

who made the request and when

it may contain a note from your employee, explaining why they need/want the vacation days they requested.

the status of the request (highlighting whether it's been already approved or denied by another manager in your organization, for instance)

the vacation periods

the effect of the request on that employee's Absence account

a breakdown per day of the request's cost that will require your confirmation.

As an example, if an employee is usually scheduled to work 3 days per week, but would like to have a vacation for a full week, you should make sure that only 3 vacation days are deducted (for the days they would have otherwise worked).
Planday recognizes there are feature requests to develop and implement to calculate and automatically provide this number of days worked per week on average in the previous 13 weeks before the vacation week.
The cost can also be split between the employee's different accounts as shown in the picture below.

a quick way to handle your employee's scheduled shifts, if any are overlapping with the vacation period, and create cover shifts to cover your schedule for this period.

How to apply for leave or absence

How to create a Bank holiday calendar

How to set up fixed Absence accounts