Initialize leave balances

What this achieves

A balance is what an employee actually has available for a leave type, and it does not exist until it is created from your active policies. Until then the employee sees no entitlement on the request form.

Required role: Administrator.

Before you start

Your leave types and policies must exist and be active first. Balances are built from the active policies, so a policy created afterwards is not reflected in balances that already exist.

Steps

Go to Settings → Leave.
Open the Balances tab.
Choose the Employee.
Select Initialize balances.

What the balance table shows

Each leave type gets a row, and the columns are worth reading rather than skipping to the last one.

Option	Description
Allocated	What the policy grants for the policy year.
Used	Days already taken.
Pending	Days committed to requests that are submitted but not yet decided.
Carried over	Days brought in from the previous policy year.
Adjustments	Manual grants or corrections applied to this balance.
Available	What the employee can actually request now.

Available is net of pending requests. A submitted request reduces what is available before anyone approves it, so an employee cannot book the same days twice while the first request is waiting.

Example: if James Whitfield has an allocation and submits a request that is still awaiting Olivia Bennett’s decision, those days show under Pending and his Available figure has already dropped.

Balances are per employee

Balances are created for one employee at a time. For a new joiner, initialising is part of setting them up — an employee with no balances cannot request leave, and the request form tells them no balance is configured rather than showing zero.

Example: after adding a new engineer at HC Corp UK Ltd, initialise their balances so annual leave appears on their request form.

What initialising does not do

It does not recalculate balances that already exist, and it does not retrospectively apply a policy change. If you change an allocation after balances exist, check the affected employees rather than assuming the new figure has flowed through — and use a manual adjustment where it has not.

What happens next

Once balances exist, the employee sees an available figure when choosing a leave type and can submit requests against it. Where a balance needs correcting — a transfer in, a goodwill grant, an error — adjust it rather than re-initialising, so the change carries a reason.