🎯 For admins and HR managers.

If you are unsure of what leave and absence employment terms are correct for your business or your employees, we encourage you to visit the Fair Work Commission Awards finder page or contact the Fair Work Ombudsman to discuss this further. Getting this right is very important and sets the foundation for paying your employees correctly. You should also seek any independent legal advice as appropriate for your business.

If you have set up leave accounts for your employees, they will be able to request leave for a specific day or period in Planday. Leave requests will show as pending action and you can choose if you, as a manager, would like to be notified further when a request is submitted.

Before you start managing leave requests, make sure you have set up absence leave types

To represent absence in Schedule, you first need to select which shift types are eligible to represent absence. Navigate to “Settings” and select “Shift types for leave”.

The mark shift types you would like to use when approving leave requests with a tick.

Overview of leave requests

To see an overview of leave requests, go to Schedule > Leave requests or click on Leave requests under Pending actions on your Home dashboard.

The list will show all future Pending requests by default. Switch to Approved or All to see the status of other requests.

You can click on the Edit icon or anywhere on the row to see the details of the request.

Adjust the overview filter

You can customise the overview of leave requests by using the options in the top bar or adding filters to the overview. This can be useful if you have many requests and you want to focus on some specific requests.

Search - Search for an employee’s name to see their request.
Period - Define a period to see the requests within this span.
Status - Filter requests by status. You can filter the status to see All the requests or only approved, denied, or pending requests.
Filters - Apply filters to see a specific selection of requests.

Approve or deny a leave request

To approve or deny a leave request for leave such as unpaid leave, click on the request to see the details.

You can Deny the request using the button in the top right.

If you’d like to Approve the request, fill out:

Daily amount in the ‘Hours’ column
Start time for when the scheduled leave / absence shift should start on the day

The account column lets you adjust which leave account’s balance will be used for the time off and Shift type specified the shift type you will see in Schedule for the given day. Finally, choose a department and employee group for the absence shifts to be created.

If any shifts are assigned to the employee during the requested absence period, you can choose to delete them or keep them. Optionally, you can also create cover shifts as duplicates of the existing shifts which will be set to Open so that they can be assigned to another employee later.

Find detailed explanations of various components of a leave request below:

Total spending: The cost of the period requested.
Overlapping shifts:
- If there are no overlapping shifts, no details will show.
- If one or more scheduled shifts overlap with the requested period, you can choose what should happen to these shifts:
  - Delete shift(s): The scheduled shifts for this employee in the requested period will be deleted.
  - Keep and change Shift type: The scheduled shifts for this employee in the requested period will remain in the schedule, but the shift type will change to the one you select. If a default shift type has been selected in the policy that will be pre-selected.
  - Cover shifts in Schedule: This feature provides the option to create extra shifts in the schedule to cover for the absence in the requested period.

Note: Approving a leave request is going to create corresponding shifts in your schedule to represent the employee’s leave. The shifts will be created in the department of your choice and will appear as approved with a palm tree indicator in the top right corner. The shifts cannot be edited from the Schedule as they always reflect the leave request through which they were created.

After Denying or Approving a request, you can find the request later by adjusting the Status filter on the Leave requests page. You can make adjustments to already approved requests or switch between the approved and denied states.

History of leave request

You can get an overview of all actions taken and by whom on a leave request by clicking the History tab.

See related articles:

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