Setting up Time off trade

The Natural HR system allows employees to buy and sell time off/leave entitlement. To enable this feature, go to

Administration > Company > Settings > Time off settings (global)

In the 'Self service' section, choose an option from the 'Allow employees to trade timeoff' dropdown:

• No means it is TOTALLY disabled.
• Yes - open Employees will be able to buy or sell time off allowances as well as book the time associated with it .
• Yes - closed employees can only book already traded time off but cannot request to make a new trade - e.g. many companies only allow the actual process of buying/selling to happen within a certain window. An Admin access level user would typically select Yes - open for a period of time e.g. three months and then change the option to Yes - closed to prevent any further trades for the rest of the year.

Setting up Time off trade, Time off type

Once set to either Yes - open or Yes - closed, you will now see additional options in the Deduction Settings section when adding or editing time off types:

Administration > HR > Time off management > Time off types

Create a new Time off type by clicking on the 'Add' button. Give the 'Time off type' a name e.g. Time off trade.

Set 'Deduct from employee allowance' to 'No', the type does not need to have a setting such as individual, limited, accrued, etc.

In the 'Deduction settings' section set 'Timeoff trades type' to 'Yes'. If set to yes, then three options appear which together control the maximum an employee can buy and sell in a period:

• Max sell value * ** 
• Max buy value * ** 

* If the value is set to 0 then employees cannot use so you could use this to allow employees to buy but not sell, or sell but not buy for example

** If there is no limit (which is unlikely) then set the max values to 999, for example

•  Trades period
  • Holiday year
  • Calendar year
  • Financial year

You can use all other options such as does not accrue, cannot be carried over and so on against the time off type.

This is ideally suited to be included within a Summary type as most companies will simply want the employee to see their overall total rather than a type called Bought and sold leave, in which case, in the 'Display settings' section, set 'Display in summary' to 'Yes'. 

A company should only have one “time off trades” type. If you have more than one you will get a warning on the Time off types index page.

You can also, optionally, setup a time off trade approval workflow – this is not required though as will use in built employee-manager default process if no custom workflow is in place

Requesting a Time off trade

To request a trade, the employee goes to

Self-service > My requests > Time off

and, at the bottom of the screen, click on the 'Time off trades' button.

Then click on the 'Add' button

The employee can add then request to buy or sell time off

The employee can add a value to buy 3, sell 2 etc. with optional comments.

And then clicks on the 'Submit' button. If the request is successful, the employee will see this information banner:

If the employee has exceeded the Max buy or Max sell value, they will see this warning banner:

The employee cannot edit an existing request – they will need to delete and resubmit the time off trade request. 

Note: The employee cannot delete a trade once approved.

The employee's manager (also Admin/HR access level users) can see the time off trades for their team etc by going to

Time and attendance > Time off

and, at the bottom of the screen, click on the 'Other actions' button and then select 'Time off trades'.

Listed here will be all the Time off trade requests that have been approved or are pending approval. The manager can add Time off trades manually, as well as edit, delete and approve.

Once approved by their manager, this request gets added to the time off type.

Booking Time off

The employee now books as normal against the relevant type, in this case Time off.  

In this example, the Time off trade and Annual Holiday time off types are included in the Time off summary time off type.

A manager can edit an approved time off trade and change the Active state from Yes to No, this removes the entitlement from the time off allowance for the Employee, i.e. they can no longer request the time off. This could be used for instance if the time off trade can only be booked within a certain date window.

Click here for more information about setting up a Summary time off type