There are occasions when you need to add time off to the system where the end date is not known. The most common scenario is the employee has called in to say they are sick and you have no way of knowing when they are returning.

In this scenario, you can add time off to the system with no end date set and no days value - this is classed as Open time off.

It is only possible to use Open time off against time off types where authorized is set to "No" - i.e. they were not authorized in advance.  If they were authorized in advance then you would know an end date, hence they would not be classed as open.

If you try to add time off with no end date to any other type of timeoff you will get a validation error as the end date is a required value - this check is not performed against unauthorized time off types.

When open time off is added for an employee, the time off listing will show the entry with no end date, no days and the approved status will be set to open - additionally on the employee card they will be marked as out of office with open time off indicated. 

When an employee has open time off, this will now show as a specific action item in the To Do section under Workflows.

The action will take you to the edit page for the time off request.

A time off request is considered as “open” whilst it has a duration of 0 i.e. the duration is unknown as the employee has not yet come back to work.

This has been added to make it easier for managers to know who is on open time off hence they should remember to close it off when the employee returns.

There is also a report available called "Open timeoff".  This can be found under:

"Reporting -> Report Library"

This report will show all instances of open timeoff currently in place across the company.