How do I request and approve leave?

Submitting a request

The number of absence days is not entered but calculated: from the person's working time model, the public holidays of their relevant federal state and their period of employment. Someone working three days part-time uses three days for a week, not five.

For leave, the check runs against the account of the year in which the period starts, not against the current year. A request submitted in December for January therefore goes against the coming year.

1. 1Choose the type and the period. If the end date is missing, the start day applies.
2. 2For a single day, optionally set the half day. The minimum number of hours for that is half the daily target from the working time model.
3. 3Check the calculated days that the system shows.
4. 4If planned shifts fall within the period, the search for cover follows on.
5. 5Submit. The request is either pending with the approver or approved immediately.

• Two absences for the same person must not overlap. The message names the conflicting period.
• There are full days and half days. Quarter days or absence down to the hour are not provided for.
• A half day exists only for a single day, not across a period.
• If the leave balance is not enough, the message names the available and the requested days.

Ten types, and what they draw on

The type determines the consequences. Only leave draws on the leave account, time off in lieu goes against the overtime balance, and the other eight types draw on neither.

Who decides

Exactly one authority decides on a request. There is no multi-stage approval chain for absences, neither as a setting nor as an exception. Management, HR, accounting and superiors with direct reports can decide.

Three routes bypass the decision, and the request is then approved immediately: types set to automatic approval across the business; sick notes and child sick, which by definition require no approval; and self-approval by management and HR for their own requests.

Self-approval does not apply when the request is created on behalf of another person. A leave request entered by HR for somebody else therefore stays pending.

1. 1The request appears on the approvals page and as a task on the dashboard.
2. 2Decide, with a justification in case of rejection.
3. 3The approval deducts the days from the account and notifies the requester by notification and email.
4. 4A decision already made can be corrected or withdrawn. The account posting is reversed in the process.

The leave account

The account is calculated continuously rather than carried forward: available is the annual entitlement plus the effective carry-over, minus the days taken and the days requested. A submitted request that has not yet been decided therefore reduces the balance immediately. That prevents two open requests from planning the same remainder.

The carry-over is used first. Days falling before the expiry date consume the carry-over first, and only the excess goes against the new annual entitlement. That way no carry-over expires that was long since used up on paper.

In the first year of employment, the residual entitlement stored in the contract takes the place of the full annual entitlement. Entitlement and carry-over can also be corrected by hand per person, and every adjustment is recorded with the editor and the timestamp.

Carry-over and expiry

At the turn of the year, a scheduled run carries the remaining balance into the following year, caps it at the configured upper limit and sets the expiry date. A negative balance carries over zero and no debt. On the cut-off date, a later run marks the unused carry-over as expired, reported separately, so that it stays traceable what expired.

Which rule applies is resolved per person: the carry-over rule from the employment contract beats the business-wide default. Before the expiry date, an advance warning can be sent to those affected, with a configurable lead time.

When a shift falls within the period

When the request is submitted, the system checks which planned shifts and day plan blocks fall within the period. The search for cover comes out of that: per shift the application suggests suitable people, one of them is asked, and if they decline, a further attempt goes to the next.

Cover is requested, not assigned. There is no automatic claim on a suitable person and no order of precedence that the system works through by itself. Every attempt is a manual decision.

Across all affected shifts, the request keeps an overall state in four stages: not required, searching, partially covered, complete. It answers the question whether the absence is covered organisationally.

Company holidays for many people at once

A company closure, for instance company holidays or a bridge day, is entered for many people in one operation. Per closure you choose whether it is counted against leave or treated as paid time off.

1. 1Choose the label, the period, how it is counted and the people affected.
2. 2Read the preview. Per person it names the days or the reason they are skipped: an existing absence, too little remaining leave, no working day in the period, no longer an active member.
3. 3Save. For each admitted person an ordinary, immediately approved absence is created, and each one receives exactly one notification.
4. 4If needed, cancel the closure as a whole. Leave counted against it is credited back.

• At most 500 people and a period of one year per closure.
• The preview decides nothing. On saving, the full check runs again per person.
• People who join after it is created are not added retrospectively.