Employee policies

TimeOff.Management gives you flexible policies to match the way your business works.

You can control access, visibility, and privacy. You can also manage how leave is earned and make sure your team is not short-staffed.

Everything is simple to set up and easy to manage.

In this guide

• Two-tier approval
• Auto-approval
• Leave increment
• Leave access
• Unlimited Allowance
• Watch by Email
• Reminders
• Team view visibility group
• Accrued Allowance Schedule
• Employee Management Roles
• Restrict leave overlap
• Tenure Based Allowance
• Company Leave Data View
• Access to Reports

Two-tier approval

This policy lets you add a first line of approval before the request goes to the employee’s department or direct manager. For example, HR can review selected leave requests first. Once approved, the request then moves on to the normal manager approval step. The policy can be set up for selected leave types, employees, departments, or location. Or you can set the employee’s direct manager as the first approval step, followed by HR or another selected user as the second approval step.

Auto-approval

This policy decides whose leave actions complete the moment they happen, with no manager decision in between. Choose who it covers — named employees, departments, locations, roles or the whole company, minus anyone you exclude — and pick which actions it auto-approves: leave requests, leave revocations, a person’s own actions, the ones they take for the employees they manage, or any mix of the four. A policy can be limited to selected leave types.

Auto-approval is only set up here. If a Two-tier approval policy also applies, the screening step still takes precedence, unless the auto-approval policy is set to skip it.

Read more: Auto-approval policy

Leave increment

Each policy sets the smallest bookable unit for the employees it covers.

Assign by employee, department, location, tag, or the whole company, and leave named people out with Excluded employees.

A policy can also be narrowed to particular leave types in its Leave types row. Left empty, it applies to every leave type. A rule that names a leave type overrides one that names none.

Leave access

You can manage leave types in two ways.

For a simple setup, leave every leave type available to everybody. This is the default, and it works well when the same leave types apply to the whole company.

For a more controlled setup, use a Leave Access policy. A Leave Access policy groups selected leave types together and assigns them to employees, departments, locations, or everybody carrying a given tag.

This is useful when different groups of people need different leave types. For example, managers may need extra leave options that regular employees do not use.

When a new employee is added to a department or location a policy already covers, they are picked up by that policy automatically.

The leave types page acts as your main storage area. You can create a leave type once, then add it only to the policies where it is needed.

Four behaviours are worth knowing before you adopt Leave Access policies.

Policies add up. An employee covered by more than one policy gets every leave type those policies grant between them.

Once you use Leave Access policies, creating a leave type no longer reaches the people those policies cover. It has to be added to the relevant policy as a second step. Employees not covered by any policy still follow the company-wide default and get it straight away. If you have just made a leave type and the people who need it cannot see it, this is almost always why.

A new department or location is not covered automatically. Adding one does not add it to any policy, so its employees will not get that policy’s leave types until somebody adds the department or location to it.

A tag is a live audience. Where a policy is scoped by a tag, an employee is inside that policy for as long as they carry the tag and drops out of it the moment an administrator takes the tag away. Read more: Tagging employees

Where a Leave Access policy governs an employee, their own Leave types tab says so and shows only what the policy has granted them.

Read more: Leave types

Unlimited Allowance

Unlimited Allowance is a flexible option in TimeOff.Management. It removes the idea of one shared “bucket” of days.

Instead, each leave type works on its own.

1. Unlimited holiday policy

Some companies offer unlimited paid time off.

There is no fixed number of days per year. Employees take leave when needed, with approval.

Unlimited Allowance supports this model by removing the yearly limit.

2. Simple and transparent setup

Go to Settings → Employee policies and select Unlimited Allowance. From there, you can assign unlimited allowance to specific locations, departments, or individual employees.

Watch by Email

“Watch by Email” policy lets selected users receive notifications about leave activity for selected employees. You can choose exactly which leave types to follow, so you only receive updates that matter to you. This is ideal for HR, project leads, or senior managers who need visibility without being direct supervisors. Configure it once and stay informed automatically.

The example below is intended for HR to use when employees book sick leave, helping them follow up on any required paperwork.

Reminders

This policy watches a group of employees and emails another group before those employees’ approved leave starts. The two groups can be the same — a team keeping an eye on each other — or two different ones, so that a department’s leave reaches the people who arrange cover. You can narrow it to selected leave types, or to leave of at least a given length.

Recipients get at most one email a night: a digest of the upcoming leave, not a message per booking. Nobody is ever reminded about their own leave.

Read more: Reminder policy

Team view visibility group

Visibility Groups allow you to extend access to Team View beyond standard department boundaries.

For example, if you have multiple teams working on a shared project—made up of employees from different departments—you can create a Visibility Group to let them see each other’s leave on Team View. This helps everyone stay aligned and understand team availability at a glance.

When a Visibility Group is applied, users included in the policy will be able to see each other on Team View, in addition to the colleagues they would normally see based on their department settings.

Another common use case is enabling collaboration between specific departments. For instance, you might want your warehouse and sales teams to view each other’s leave, while keeping this information hidden from other departments. A Visibility Group makes this easy to set up and manage.

Accrued Allowance Schedule

The Accrued Allowance Schedule lets you create a tailored policy for how annual leave is earned over time.

You can set up a simple, proportional accrual—where allowance builds up evenly across the company year. Alternatively, you can design more specific schedules to match your business needs.

For example, if employees work on a 10-month contract within a 12-month period, you can configure the policy so that their time off accrues only during those 10 working months.

Where to find it

Go to Settings → Employee policies and select Accrued Allowance Schedules, in the Allowance group. The page opens with its own help, How Accrued Allowance Schedules work, which folds away, then Add schedule and the list of schedules, in name order. With no schedule yet, it says No accrued allowance schedules found, with Add schedule under it.

Each schedule in the list shows how much it releases in a leave year and how often, and how many employees follow it. A chip says what needs attention: an amber one, a current leave year with no releases, so that employees on the schedule get no allowance from it; a plain one, a next leave year that is not set up yet. Select a schedule to open its page.

Add a schedule

1. Select Add schedule.
2. Under Name, enter the schedule’s Name and, if you like, a Description of what it is for.
3. Under Employees, add the employees who follow it. You can also leave it empty and put people on the schedule from their Allowance tab: see Setting up allowances.
4. Under Releases for [year], the current leave year, enter the Allowance, what an employee on the schedule has by the end of the leave year, and choose how it is Released: Monthly, Fortnightly or Weekly, from the start of the leave year.
5. Check the preview under it, marked Preview: the year’s chart and table, as the schedule’s page will show them.
6. Select Add. The schedule is added and its page opens, where you can fine-tune its releases and set up later leave years.

Cancel goes back to the list.

Read a schedule

A schedule’s page takes the list’s place, with All schedules above it to go back to the list. From the top:

• Summary: a few sentences on what the schedule releases over the current leave year and how often, how many employees follow it, and anything that needs attention.
• Name: the schedule’s Name and Description.
• Employees: a chip for each employee who follows it, which opens their details. Each employee follows one schedule at most, so adding someone here moves them off any other schedule.
• Releases: a button for each leave year the schedule holds, and the + to set up another (see Set up the next leave year). A year from the current one on that holds no release carries an amber dot. Under the buttons, a line gives the selected year’s dates, says if it is the Current year, the Next year or a Finished year, and how many releases it holds and how much they make.

The selected year is drawn as a chart of the allowance building up through the leave year, step by step, with Today marked in the current year and what is available then. Under the chart, a table lists each release with its Date, how much is Released, what is Available from this date, counting every release up to and including that date, and its Note, and ends with the year’s total, By the end of the year. A year with no releases says so, and that employees on the schedule get no allowance from it for that year, with Add releases, which opens the form with the dialog Generate… opens, to generate the year’s releases or copy an earlier year’s.

Change a schedule

Open the ⋯ menu at the top right of the schedule’s page, More actions, and select Edit schedule. The whole page turns into one form, in place: you can change the name, the description, the employees and every leave year’s releases.

In the selected year, each release is a row of its Date, the amount Released and a Note:

• Add release adds a row, and Remove release, the bin at the end of a row, takes it out. Under the rows, By the end of the year gives the year’s total.
• Generate… opens Replace [year]‘s releases (Set up [year] on a year with no rows), to fill the year in place of its rows: Generate the releases from an Allowance and how it is Released, or Copy [year]‘s releases where an earlier year has some.
• Copy from [year], where an earlier year has releases, replaces the year’s rows with the nearest such year’s releases, on the same dates in this year, with their amounts and notes.
• Remove [year] takes the whole year out. A year already saved goes when you save, and its button stays, switched off, until then.

Save changes and Cancel sit at the bottom of the form and stay in view as the page scrolls. Nothing is saved until you select Save changes, which saves every change in the form and shows the schedule again. Cancel drops every change. If the form refuses a value, it says why under the field and stays open.

Set up the next leave year

Each leave year has releases of its own, so a schedule’s next leave year is set up before it starts. Employees on a schedule get no allowance from it for a leave year with no releases.

1. On the schedule’s page, select the + beside the year buttons. It shows the leave year it sets up: the earliest from the current one on that the schedule does not hold yet.
2. In the Set up [year] dialog, choose how to fill the year:
   • Generate the releases from an Allowance and how it is Released, prefilled from the nearest earlier year with releases;
   • Copy [year]‘s releases: the same dates, with their amounts and notes, where an earlier year has releases;
   • Start with no releases, to add the rows yourself: until you do, employees on the schedule get no allowance from it for that year.
3. Select Set up [year]. The year goes into the form, where you can fine-tune its rows.
4. Select Save changes.

Cancel in the dialog goes back without setting up the year.

Delete a schedule

Open the ⋯ menu on the schedule’s page and select Delete schedule, then confirm with Delete. The schedule is deleted, the list opens again, and its employees stop following it.

Employee Management Roles

Assign management permissions (view, add, edit, delete) for selected employee groups without full admin rights. Example: allow HR to view employee data by creating a role and adding employees; assign the HR team member as Role Owner.

Restrict leave overlap

This policy defines a group of employees and a limit on how many of them may be away at the same time — at most a given number absent, or at least a given number present. When a leave request would break the limit, the policy either refuses it or lets it through and attaches a warning for the manager. You can narrow it to selected leave types, and to a restricted period such as a shutdown or a peak.

A group is built from employees, departments, locations and tags, or the whole company, minus anyone you exclude. Naming a department covers everybody in it, so somebody who joins later is in the group without an administrator touching it. A company can run as many groups as it likes, and an employee can be in several.

Read more: Restrict leave overlap

Tenure Based Allowance

Automatically increase allowance based on start date and configured bands. Each band adds to the base allowance (not cumulative). Only the last applicable band applies.

Ensure starting allowance is 0 before bands apply:

• Individual: the employee’s Allowance tab → Edit nominal allowance → Set individual allowance → 0
• Department: Settings → Departments → Set allowance to 0 days

The system moves employees between bands automatically when milestones are reached. Example allowance view after 10 years:

Company Leave Data View

Provide selected employees (e.g., PAs, admins) access to Team View and individual calendars across all departments for coordination. Assign in the policy editor. The Policies tab in an employee’s details shows whether it applies to them.

Access to Reports

Grant selected employees access to the Reports section for departments where they are an Employee, Approver, or Secondary Approver. Admins retain full access. Assign in the policy editor; you can modify or revoke anytime.

The Policies tab in an employee’s details shows whether it applies to them.