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.

A leave balance is used to store the amount of leave an employee accrues and has made available for them to use. The balance decreases over time as employees use it for leave requests, and increases as they accrue more time off.

By default, the Leave accounts page shows the account’s estimated balance as of today, allowing you to check the account’s balance on a past or future date by adjusting the end date of the period filter. For a detailed view over a longer period of time, set both a start and end date on the period filter.

If you, as an admin, need to change an employee’s balance for any reason, you can create a manual adjustment by:

A manual adjustment can add or deduct from an employee’s leave balance and can be set to take effect from the current date or a date in future.

Planday estimates your employees’ leave balances based on Schedule data, however, the balances are only estimates and you and your employees should always refer to the latest Xero payslip to learn the exact amount of leave available.

This is the estimated hours an employee becomes entitled to use, depending on the number of hours they work or the length of time they are an eligible employee.

In order for your employees to earn leave in Planday, we use Start balances and Leave accrual rates to calculate the amount of available leave.

By setting a Start balance on the employee’s Leave account, you can make the eligible amount of leave available to them from the beginning of their applicable entitlement period.

To accrue leave gradually, Planday uses a Leave accrual rate. The rate is always specified in the Leave policies in Settings and is inherited by all employees’ accounts.

You can choose between various methods of accrual such as percentage, hours per day, or hours per month. If your employees are entitled to a fixed amount of leave, you can set a ‘Start balance’ and set the rate to ‘Do not accrue’.

Leave policies’ accrual rates will vary depending on the modern award you have enabled from Planday’s award library.