Understanding Leave Allowances, Balances & Other Terms
The Time Off/Leave Balance chart is one of the most common things that you will see for your Employees. Your Employees will also see this chart (shown below) in their own Employee Portal, so it's incredibly important to understand what each column means and how it affects Leave for your Employees.
Let's walk through each of the columns and explain what they mean.
Time Off/Leave Type
The first column is dedicated to the Leave Type and shows you which Policy Type is shown in that specific row.
Allowance (Annual)
Allowances are annual leave amounts that are designated to each employee based on the Policy itself and based on the rules you have created for the Policy. For example, if you have created a Time Off Policy whereby Employees are granted 20 days off per year, the Allowances section will show 20 days off by default.
When you create a new Leave Policy, you will be given the option to start your Employees with a Default Allowance. Default Allowance is the starting number that each Employee will have as their Allowance when you create the Policy and make it active and available to your Employees.
In other words, the Allowance is the amount of time (either in days or in hours) that the Employee is allowed based on the policy, but it's not necessarily the amount of time that the Employee actually has available to take.
Many of our support questions are related to understanding the differences between Allowances versus Balances, so read on to learn about what Balance means in HR Partner.
Balance (Accrued)
Where the Allowance is the amount of leave that the Policy allocates to an Employee, the Balance is the actual amount of leave that an Employee has. This is especially important for new Employees that join your organization and for organizations who are newly subscribed to HR Partner. The Balance amount tells the system where to start when calculating Available amounts.
The Balance amount is something that you will have to manually import or edit for each Employee when you first Setup your HR Partner system for your organization. This is something that only has do be done once because you are telling the system what the Employee's current, active Balance amount is!
It's incredibly important to input the Balance amounts for your Employees during your Setup process, and you can read more about that here: Setting Up Time Off & Leave Policies
Taken
Leave shown in the "Taken" column is leave that has been Taken by an Employee.
Planned (In the future)
The column entitled Planned (In the future) will show any Approved Leave Requests that are upcoming. If your Employee has request any type of Leave for a date in the future and that request as officially been 'Approved' then that will show un in the Planned (In the future) column. When the date of the Approved Request comes up, this will automatically move from the Planned column and over to the Balance column.
Please Note: Planned amounts will NOT show up in the ‘Planned’ column until the reset date rolls around (this is either a Fixed Date - e.g. Jan. 1st - or an Employee's Anniversary Date). However, when your Employee is entering in a leave request, it should show on the ‘You will have an estimated x days on this date’ if they are creating a Leave Request for the next year.
Available (To take)
Available (To take) shows you how much Leave is currently available to the Employee to request. The system calculates what is Available to the Employee by subtracting any Planned leave amounts from the Employee's current Balance.
Units
When you create a new Leave Policy, you have the option of managing that Policy in two different types of Units: Days or Hours. This column shows you and your Employee which unit is used for that row.
For even more definitions related to other common Leave Terms, please take a look at this article.