Create a leave policy

What this achieves

A leave policy says how many days a leave type grants, how those days build up through the year, what happens to unused ones, and who qualifies. Balances are generated from your active policies, so nobody has an entitlement until a policy covers them.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Create the leave type first — a policy is attached to one. Settle your accrual, proration, and carry-over decisions before you open the form, because they shape what employees see all year.

Steps

Go to Settings → Leave.
Open the Policies tab.
Select Add Policy.
Under Basics, choose the Leave type and enter a Policy name.

Example: UK Full-time Annual Leave.
Under Allocation, set the Annual allocation and the Unit, and set Prorate on hire with a Proration method if new joiners should receive a reduced first year.
Under Accrual, choose the Frequency, and set an Accrual amount (override) only if your policy accrues unevenly.
Under Carry-Over, set Allow carry-over, Max carry-over days, and Expiry (months).
Under Eligibility, set Min tenure (months), Employment types, and Genders as needed. Leave a filter empty to place no constraint on it.
Under Policy Year, set the Year start and Fiscal start month.
Set Default for this type if this is the fallback policy.
Leave Active switched on.
Select Create policy.

Allocation and accrual

Option	Description
Annual allocation	Days or hours granted per policy year.
Unit	Whether the allocation is expressed in Days or Hours.
Prorate on hire	Reduce the first-year allocation for mid-year joiners.
Frequency	None (granted upfront), Monthly, Quarterly, or Annually.
Accrual amount (override)	A per-period amount, where the policy does not accrue in equal steps.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd grants annual leave up front, so the frequency is None (granted upfront) and the whole allocation is available from the start of the policy year.

Eligibility

Every filter you set must be true of the employee, and an empty filter places no constraint. Available filters are minimum tenure, employment type, and gender.

Example: a policy filtered to full-time employees above a tenure threshold reaches only HC Corp UK Ltd staff meeting both. Someone part-time, or below the threshold, falls through to another policy.

A current limitation: grade and department are not yet available as eligibility filters, so those two dimensions cannot be used today.

Always have a default

One policy per leave type is marked Default for this type, and it applies to employees who match no other policy.

Without a default, an employee matching no policy has no entitlement for that type at all. That shows up as a missing balance rather than as an obvious error, so it is easy to miss until someone tries to book time off.

Example: HC Corp UK Ltd marks its standard full-time annual leave policy as the default, and layers a longer-tenure policy above it. Anyone matching neither still receives the default.

Deleting a policy

Deleting a policy leaves existing balances alone — employees keep what they have — but the policy stops applying to new requests. Deactivating has a similar effect and keeps the configuration visible, which makes it easier to explain a historic balance later.

What happens next

A policy grants nothing until balances are initialised from it. Once balances exist, employees see an available figure on the request form and can book against it. Changing a policy afterwards does not retrospectively rewrite balances that already exist, so check the result rather than assuming.