Leave Management Overview
Leave management is how your organization defines time-off policies, lets employees request leave, and routes those requests for approval. This page explains the concepts that everything else in this section builds on. Once you understand leave types, balances, and the request lifecycle, the deeper pages will make sense quickly.
Leave types
A leave type is a category of time off — Annual Leave, Sick Leave, Maternity, Bereavement, and so on. Administrators define them, and each type controls how requests of that kind behave. Key settings on a leave type include:
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Active | Only active types appear in the request form. Deactivating a type hides it from new requests without deleting historical leave. |
| Annual allowance | The default number of days granted per fiscal year for this type. |
| Allow half days | Whether employees can book mornings/afternoons. On by default. |
| Allow hourly / custom hours | Whether employees can book partial-day leave by exact start/end time (single day only). |
| Minimum days notice | How far in advance a request must be booked. |
| Maximum days per request | A cap on the length of any single request. |
| Requires approval | If off, requests of this type are granted automatically. |
| Requires documentation | A flag indicating supporting documents are expected (note: there is no attachment upload in the booking flow itself). |
| Paid leave | Whether the leave is paid or unpaid (shown as a pill in the booking modal). |
Balances and buckets
Every leave type deducts from exactly one balance bucket:
| Bucket | Typical use |
|---|---|
| ANNUAL | Standard paid vacation allowance. |
| SICK | Sick leave allowance, tracked separately from annual. |
| NONE | The type does not draw down a shared balance. Non-deductible types (e.g. Maternity, Bereavement) are instead capped against their own per-type usage. |
The annual allowance available to a user is their custom allowance (or the organization default) plus any carried-over days. "Used" is the sum of APPROVED and PENDING leaves in the current fiscal period — pending requests already reserve balance so you can't accidentally double-spend. CANCELLED, REJECTED, and WITHDRAWN leaves never count against balance.
See Leave balances for the full picture, including carry-over.
The fiscal year
Balances reset on your organization's leave year start month (leaveYearStartMonth) — this is not necessarily January. If your fiscal year begins in April, the allowance window runs April through March, and carry-over is calculated against that window. All "current period" usage is measured against this fiscal year, not the calendar year.
How days are counted
When you request leave across a date range, BookYourPTO counts business days only:
- Weekends (by default Saturday and Sunday) are excluded.
- Public holidays are excluded — organization holidays, the user's own holiday country/region, and any per-user holiday overrides.
Non-working days that fall inside your range are silently skipped from the deduction and surfaced as an information banner. You never spend allowance on a day you weren't going to work anyway. Half-day portions at the start or end of a range subtract 0.5 each.
The request → approval lifecycle
A typical request moves through these states:
- PENDING — submitted and awaiting approval. Counts against balance. The owner can still edit or cancel it before it starts.
- APPROVED — granted. Still counts against balance. To undo an approved leave the owner must submit a cancellation request.
- REJECTED — declined with a reason. Does not count. Terminal.
- CANCELLED — withdrawn or cancelled. Does not count. Terminal.
Some requests skip the queue and are auto-approved at creation — for example when an executive books their own leave, when an admin or executive books on someone's behalf, when a department head books for an employee in their own department, or when the leave type has approval turned off.
See Troubleshooting for the full status reference and error messages.
Where to go next
- Requesting leave — the request form, every field, and validation rules.
- Leave balances — allowances, carry-over, and where balances are shown.
- Group booking — book the same leave for a whole department.
- Editing and cancelling — edit pending requests and cancel approved leave.
- Leave approvals — for managers reviewing the queue.