HR Settings — leave types, plans & balances

What this guide covers

The leave side of HR Settings: the Leave Types and Leave Plan tabs, how an employee's balance is built from them, and the tools HR uses to keep balances accurate.

Who can open it: HR Settings needs HR write permission. Balance figures are sensitive — this guide explains the mechanics, not anyone's actual numbers.

Leave Types vs Leave Plans vs Balances

These three are easy to confuse, so it helps to see how they stack up:

How a leave balance is built: 1 Leave Type (the kind of leave - paid/unpaid, certificate needed, annual limits); 2 Leave Plan (opening entitlement and accrual rate, assigned to an employee); 3 the balance = Entitlement + Accrued - Taken = Available balance. HR can adjust balances and run drift check, annual reconciliation or backfill to keep them right.

Leave Types

The kinds of leave (Annual, Sick, Unpaid, Family Responsibility, …). For each type you set whether it's paid or unpaid, whether a certificate is required (e.g. a sick note), and any annual limit. Types are the vocabulary the whole leave system uses.

Leave Plan

The rules per type for a group of employees: the opening entitlement and the accrual rate (how much is earned over time). A plan is assigned to an employee — usually at onboarding (wizard step 7) — and that's what seeds their balances.

The balance

An employee's available balance for a type is simply:

Entitlement (opening grant) + Accrued (earned over time) − Taken (approved leave used) = Available

So approved leave reduces the balance, and accrual tops it up on the plan's schedule.

Keeping balances accurate

Balances can drift from the approved-leave history over time (corrections, mid-year changes, data fixes). HR Settings provides tools to put them right — use them deliberately, as they're audited:

Adjust a balance directly for one employee when a one-off correction is needed.
Drift check — surfaces balances whose "taken" no longer matches the approved-request history, so you can reconcile them.
Annual reconciliation — re-bases annual-type balances to a snapshot date and replays accruals, for the start of a new cycle.
Balance backfill — a one-shot rebuild from a snapshot date that replays accruals up to today.

Good to know

Set types and plans up before onboarding so a plan can be assigned in the wizard.
Unpaid types still record leave, but they don't pay — and they show up as "missing"/unpaid time in attendance.
The maintenance tools are powerful — they rewrite balances; run them when you understand what they'll change.

Leave request statuses field definitions — what each leave-request status means.
Manage your team's leave — how managers approve the requests that draw down these balances.
Apply for leave — what the employee does to request leave.