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Integrating Leave & Contracted hours
The Leave & Contracted Hours integration lets you map leave policies to contract rules so that approved leave automatically counts towards an employee's contracted hours. This removes the need to manually create leave shifts in the Schedule to keep contracted hours accurate.
Not using leave shifts in Schedule? You just need to make sure your contract rules and leave policies are in place, then map them:
Go to Settings > People > Contract rules and open a contract rule
In the leave policies section, select the leave policy (or policies) that should count towards this rule and click Save
Verify by going to Schedule > Contracted Hours - the new Approved Leave column should reflect approved leave for employees in the current period
That is all. The rest of this article is for organizations that have been using leave shifts as a workaround.
If you use leave shifts in Schedule
If you have been creating shifts with leave shift types like “Holiday” or “Annual Leave” to make approved leave count towards contracted hours, complete this extra step before you enable the mapping. This prevents leave from being counted twice.
Why leave may be counted twice
Once you map a leave policy to a contract rule, approved leave is counted automatically. If you still create leave shifts for the same leave type, those hours are counted twice: once in the leave request and once in the shift.
To avoid this, exclude your leave shift type from contracted hours before enabling the mapping.
Note: If you use leave shifts to push leave data into the payroll output and select payroll integrations (e.g. Xero or Fortnox), read the payroll note before you start.
Follow the section that matches how your leave policies track time:
Leave tracked in hours
Step 1: Identify your leave shift type(s)
Go to Settings > Schedule > Shift types and note the name(s) of the shift types you have been using to represent leave (e.g. "Holiday", "Annual Leave").
Step 2: Configure the contract rule
Go to Settings > People > Contract rules and open the relevant contract rule. In one place, do both of the following:
In the shift type settings, set your leave shift type(s) to not count towards contracted hours
In the leave policies section, select the leave policy (or policies) that should count towards this rule
Click Save.
Step 3: Verify
Go to Schedule > Contracted Hours and check the new Approved Leave column for employees with approved leave in the current period. The deviation figure should reflect the leave - absence hours reduce the gap.
The Approved Leave values are based on Deductions in approved leave requests. In case of suspected inaccuracy, verify that leave requests are approved with correct deductions and contract rules are mapped to the corresponding leave policies
Step 4 (optional): Stop creating leave shifts
Once you are satisfied the set up is working correctly, you can stop creating leave shifts for those leave types. The approved leave request alone is now sufficient.
Leave tracked in days
Day-based policies follow the same steps as above, with one additional consideration: contracted hours now rely on the Duration value stored in each approved leave request. The duration field represents the length of a day of leave in hours.
Note: The Duration field was introduced in March 2026, so requests approved before that date have a duration of 0 and will not contribute to contracted hours unless manually updated.
Step 1: Identify your leave shift type(s)
Go to Settings > Schedule > Shift types and note the name(s) of the shift types you have been using to represent leave.
Step 2: Configure the contract rule
Go to Settings > People > Contract rules and open the relevant contract rule. In one place, do both of the following:
In the shift type settings, set your leave shift type(s) to not count towards contracted hours
In the leave policies section, select the leave policy (or policies) that should count towards this rule
Click Save.
Step 3: Update Duration on leave requests (optional)
To keep your contracted hours figures accurate, review approved leave and update any Duration values that are still 0 for leave requests approved before March 2026.
Step 4: Verify
Go to Schedule > Contracted Hours and check the Approved Leave column. Keep in mind that periods prior to March 2026 may show lower-than-expected values if historical requests have not been updated in Step 3.
Step 5 (optional): Stop creating leave shifts
Once you are satisfied the set up is working correctly, you can stop creating leave shifts for those leave types. The approved leave request alone is now sufficient.
Using leave shifts for payroll?
If you use leave shifts to sync leave data into the payroll output and select payroll integrations (e.g. Xero or Fortnox), you will still need to continue creating them for payroll export purposes.
Note: Full integration of the leave module to payroll output is planned as a future improvement. You can choose to adopt this integration now or wait until you can move away from leave shifts fully.
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