Within time off settings there is an option to set employees allowance to accrue called “Timeoff allowances accrual” – if you set this option then an employee will have no entitlement to any allowance until they have accrued the entitlement.  

For example, simplistically, on 1^st Jan if you are NOT using accrual an employee would see all their, for example, 28 days leave entitlement and could, in theory, book all 28 days on 1^st Jan even though they have not yet actually earned that entitlement.

If they then left mid-year it would be possible that they could have taken more than their entitlement.

If you use “Timeoff allowances accrual” then this situation can be avoided. On 1^st Jan the employee will show zero allowance as they have not yet accrued any allowance. On 1^st Feb they would have accrued 1/12^th of their allowance so would be entitled to 2.33 days, on 1^st March they would have accrued 1/6^th of their allowance so would be entitled to 4.66 days and so on. 

In the case of using “Timeoff allowances accrual” you can also set the “Allow employees to request more days than allowance” accordingly which would either allow or disallow them from booking allowance until it is earned.

Within “Timeoff allowances accrual” there are 4 different ways of calculating entitlement and these are explained below.

Let’s assume an employee starts on 13th April and the holiday year runs from 1^st Jan to 31^st December with a whole year entitlement of 28 days and we want to calculate their entitlement on 22^nd December.

Daily accrual

From 13^th April to 22^nd December is 254 days – this is equal to 69.6% of the working year hence they, at this point, would be entitled to 19.48 days.

Whole months

In this instance we work out entitlement in whole months – between 13^th April and 22^nd December there have been 8 months hence the entitlement is 2/3 of the annual entitlement or 18.67 days.

Actual months

This example works out very similarly to daily accrual but will vary slightly.

Between 13^th April and 22^nd December there have been 8 months and 10 days – one “month” is 1/12 of a year hence is equal to 30.42 days therefore the calculated value is 8.3333 months which gives an allowance of 19.37 days.

Whole completed calendar months

This final example only gives the employee credit for the completed months they have worked – in this instance they have worked May, June, July, August, September, October and November which is 7 months so the outcome is 7/12 of their entitlement or 16.33 days.