Adjust leave entitlement manually

Sometimes an employee's leave entitlement differs from the automatically calculated value - for example because days are left over from last year, because someone worked on a public holiday and is credited an extra day of leave for it, or because a special case calls for a deduction. For exactly these cases you can adjust the entitlement manually, without touching the underlying base entitlement (such as the 30 contract days).

Every adjustment is stored as its own, permanently traceable position: with the date, the person, the number of days and a reason. This makes it possible at any time to see who credited or deducted how much, when and why.

What can I do here?

• Increase or decrease an employee's leave entitlement for a specific year - by any number of whole or half days. Five remaining days are a single adjustment, not five.
• Record the balance carried over from last year as such, so it is shown separately from the current year's entitlement in the allowance tile.
• Attach a reason to every adjustment (mandatory field).
• View the history of all adjustments - in the employee file and in the employee portal (a standalone application for staff, in preparation).

Where do I find the feature?

Open People → Employees, select the employee and switch to the Vacation tab. At the top you see the allowance tile with the base entitlement. Below it is the Entitlement adjustments area with the Add adjustment button.

The feature is only visible to people with the Manage HR permission. Without that permission you can see existing adjustments in the allowance tile, but you cannot create a new one.

The button always stays visible: once the section is open it reads Close and takes you back to the closed state. Whether the section is open is also reflected in the address bar - a shared link opens it the same way for the recipient, and the browser's back button closes it again.

When no entitlement has been recorded for the year yet

An adjustment always builds on an existing leave entitlement. If none has been recorded for the employee in the selected year - the normal situation right after the turn of the year and for newly created employees - there is nothing to adjust.

In that case the section says so explicitly and offers the next step right away: Create the entitlement for this year takes you straight to HR → Absences → Entitlements, already set to the selected year. Create the entitlement there; afterwards you can adjust it in the Leave tab as described.

While the entitlements are still loading, the section reads "Loading entitlements …" instead of stating that no absence type is available. The two states are deliberately distinguishable - a request still in flight says nothing about whether an entitlement exists.

Creating an adjustment

1. In the Vacation tab, click Add adjustment.
2. Choose the absence type (usually "Vacation").
3. Choose the type of adjustment: "Manual adjustment" for the normal case, "Carried over from last year" for last year's remaining balance. A carry-over is always a credit, so the direction is fixed in that case.
4. Choose the direction: "Credit (+)" adds days, "Deduction (−)" removes days.
5. Enter the number of days - whole or half days, for example 5 or 2.5. There is no one-day limit; the ceiling per adjustment is 365 days.
6. Enter a reason - for example "worked on a public holiday (substitute day)". Without a reason the adjustment cannot be saved.
7. The applicable year is the year selected at the top of the tab. If you want an adjustment for a different year, switch the year at the top first.
8. Click Save adjustment.

The new position appears in the allowance tile immediately, and the available remaining entitlement is adjusted accordingly.

Recording last year's remaining leave

If an employee has days left over from last year that should count towards the current year, create one adjustment for them: type "Carried over from last year", the number of days matching the remaining balance, and a reason such as "Remaining leave 2025".

The carry-over then appears in the allowance tile marked as Carry-over, plus as its own subtotal row "Carried over from last year" below the base entitlement. This keeps it visible which part of the available entitlement comes from the current year and which from last year - it does not disappear into the total as an anonymous credit.

The automatic year-end carry-over from the leave policies is unaffected by this. The adjustment described here is the manual route for cases the automatic carry-over did not capture.

How adjustments feed into the calculation

The remaining entitlement is base entitlement + carry-over + sum of adjustments − days taken. A credit of five days therefore increases the available remaining entitlement by five days - and a leave request that uses these extra days is correctly checked against the increased allowance.

A deduction is only possible as far as there is cover: the base entitlement plus carry-over plus existing adjustments must not add up to less than zero. Days from the carry-over count towards that cover.

The base entitlement itself stays unchanged. It remains at the top of the allowance tile; the adjustments appear as their own rows below it.

Why an adjustment cannot be edited or deleted

Adjustments are immutable. If you made a mistake or a credit needs to be reversed, simply create a counter-adjustment (for example "Deduction (−) 1 day" with a corresponding reason). This keeps the full history intact - so any later review can tell what was originally booked and what was corrected afterwards.

Every adjustment is also recorded in a tamper-evident audit log.

Adjustments booked by the system

Besides the adjustments you enter by hand, the system itself can book a position. Such rows carry the label System correction in the allowance card, so you can see at a glance that no person entered them.

The only case so far is the follow-up correction after the substitute-day repair (see Calendar & holidays): leave requests approved before that change that span a substitute working day deducted that day as leave although it is a day off. The day deducted too much is credited back to the employee as a system correction.

Deliberately, this works as follows:

• The approved request stays as it is. Its stored day count, its approver and its timestamp are not touched - a decided matter is not rewritten after the fact. The difference appears instead as its own visible position in the leave account.
• The reason names the cause and the date. It contains the ticket number and the holiday concerned, so every credit can be traced back to a specific request.
• Settled leave years stay untouched. If a year's carry-over has already expired under your expiry rule, nothing is booked for that year any more.
• Nothing is ever credited twice. A system correction that is already booked is recognised and not repeated.
• Nothing is ever deducted. The follow-up correction only gives back; it never takes anything away from an employee retroactively.

Every system correction is additionally recorded in the employee record's audit log, where it is linked to the request concerned and marked as "System".

If you want to reverse a system correction, create a counter-adjustment as you would for any other position. System corrections are immutable too.

Related topics

• Absences - allowances, requests, policies and carry-over
• Calendar & Holidays - holiday calendars and their effect on the vacation calculation
• Employees - the employee file with the "Vacation" tab