Introduction
We know creating Time Off policies can sometimes be tricky. In this article, we'll walk through the entire process step by step - ensuring you know exactly how to customize a policy to your unique company needs.
*Please note: this article covers how to set up a Time Off policy post launching Sapling in your organization. If you're looking for information on how to initially set up the Time Off module pre-launch, check our Recommendations for Rolling Out Time Off.
This article covers the following topics:
Time Off Overview
The Time Off tab provides an overview of different leave components for all team members within the organization (active and inactive). With the Time Off tab, users can see a snapshot of the following:
- Available Balance: This shows a summary of their applicable Policies and Time Off balances.
- Estimate Future Balance: This allows team members to enter in a future date, and see accrual details until that point in time. *note: For unlimited time off policies, this will be greyed out as there are no accruals
- Time Off- Upcoming: This shows requests that are in the future - both pending or approved. It will also show any upcoming holidays.
- Time Off - Historical: This shows requests that are in the past (pending or approved), cancelled requests, denied requests, and adjustments.
Adding a new Time Off Policy
Before setting up a policy, be sure to double-check your permission levels. Each permission group a policy applies to needs to have "View" access for their own Time Off information to enable this feature in their Sapling account.
- Everyone with the "team member" permission level can: view their own Time Off Calendar, current Time Off policies and accrued time, past/upcoming Time Off Requests, Request Time Off
- Everyone with the "manager" permission category can: view their own Time Off Calendar, current Time Off policies and accrued time, past/upcoming Time Off Requests, view the upcoming Time Off Requests of their direct reports from their Team page, Request Time Off/Approve or Deny time off requests of their direct reports and make comments as necessary
- Everyone with the "admin" or "super admin" permission level can: view their own Time Off Calendar, current Time Off policies and accrued time, past/upcoming Time Off Requests, view upcoming Time Off Requests of all employees, Request Time Off, or create, modify or delete all company time-off policies
To create a new Time Off policy, navigate from Administration Tools > Time Off. Click "Add New Policy" in the upper-righthand corner.
The Time Off policy creator has 5 steps:
1) Policy details
2) Policy rules
3) Accrual settings
4) Time off balances
5) Approvals
1. Policy details
In this section, you'll input all the basic information about your policy, who it applies for, and how it should be tracked:
- Policy Name: Name of the policy you're creating (for ex: San Francisco - Full-Time Employees)
- Time Off Type: what type of policy this is (for ex: Vacation, Jury Duty, Sick Leave, etc.)
- Display icon: what icon you'd like to display with the policy to easily distinguish (for ex: a ✈️ for Vacation)
- Display this policy on the calendar and in any calendar feeds - tick if you want the policy to show in the calendar feed. If not ticked the time off will show as 'Unavailable'
- Is this policy paid or unpaid leave? - used for reporting
2. Policy rules
- Is this an unlimited policy: If no --> move to the next section. If yes --> you can edit how it's displayed to employees in Sapling (for ex: an unlimited policy that's displayed as "Discretionary Time Off" to employees)
- How should Time off be tracked: select hours or days
- How many hours in a workday?: input the number of hours in your standard workday (for ex: 8 hours)
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Which days of the week should this policy apply to?: what days are considered working days for this policy
- Time off requests that include those days will deduct hours/days from the available balance (for example, a time off request that ranges from Friday through Monday will deduct 2 days from the balance if Monday and Friday are ticked and Sunday and Saturday are not)
- This setting defaults to a standard workweek: Monday through Friday are ticked
- By default, scheduled holidays (configured under Platform Settings) aren't ticked resulting in no time deducted for them if time off requests overlap with those scheduled holidays
- Ticking the "This policy also applied to holidays" setting treats scheduled holidays like the ticked days of the week (continuing the Friday through Monday time off request example from above, if Monday were a scheduled holiday, and this setting is unticked, only 1 day will be deducted from the balance: Friday)
- Accruals to balances follow the same pattern above as time off request deductions (ticked boxes generate accruals)
- Who is this policy for: you can select if this is for "All Employees", "Some Employees" (if you select this, you can then input what Location, Department, and Employee Status it applies to), or "Manually assigned as needed" (for specialty policies like parental leave)
- Apply a minimum / maximum to time off requests: leave on "no" if there is no min/max, or select "yes" to input
3. Accrual settings
Use these settings to control how time off is accrued for this policy.
Rates
These settings define how often team members receive an accrual. This typically aligns with organization's pay cycle.
- How much time can team members accrue: First, decide the amount of total hours/days your team should accrue under this policy (for ex: 120 hours per year, or 10 hours per month). Please note that both working and non-working days (eg. bank holidays, weekends) count towards accruals.
- What is the accrual frequency: this dictates how often team members receive their accrual. This typically aligns with your pay cycle (for ex: if your team gets paid every two weeks, the accrual frequency would be "bi-weekly")
Scheduling
In this section, you'll set the accrual calendar, decide on key rulesets for how and when Sapling handles this policy, and add any special rules around tenureship.
- When should this policy start accruing: choose when this policy should begin to accrue - either starting on the new hire's "Start Date", or select a "Custom Date" which is set as X days before or after their start date.
- When should this policy renew: options to select either "On team member's anniversary", "1st of January", or you can choose a "Custom Date" undefined.
- How should Sapling handle the first accrual: select if you'd like to "Prorate the amount", or have the "Full balance" given at the start of the accrual period.
- When do accruals happen: select whether time off should start "At the start of the Period" or "At the end of the period".
- Apply a maximum accrual amount: select this option if this policy has a maximum amount of hours and input the 'Accrual maximum (hours)' (for example: max 120 hours, please note if you allow carryover, then the maximum accrual should be max balance and carryover combined. for ex: if you allow for 120 hours to be accrued in a year and allow for 40 hours to be carried over, then your maximum accrual should be 160 hours).
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Stop accruals after a certain date: select this option if you'd like this policy to stop accruing after a specific number of days and enter the 'Number of days'.
- For example, if you have a policy where team members only accrue for 6 months after start date, then you would enter 180 days (6 months). The team member only accrues for those six months, until the policy is renewed. Please note that both working and non-working days (eg. bank holidays, weekends) count towards accruals.
Tenureship
- Tenureship: if you have additional time off benefits related to tenureship, you can input those rules here.
*Please note: balances do NOT compound - all added balances are in relation to the original policy amount. For example: let's say you give your team an additional 1 day (8 hours) of vacation for every year they work. This would mean that on their 2 year anniversary, they will earn a total of 16 additional hours of time off.
4. Time off balances
In this section, you'll set the rules for what to do with rollover and negative balances.
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Allow time off to rollover into the following period: If selected you can:
- Apply a maximum amount of time off which can be rolled over: select if there are a maximum number of hours you'd like to rollover (for ex: 40 hours)
- Expire rollover balances: select it and set the expiry date if balances should expire
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Can team members obtain a negative balance for this policy: select if team members are allowed to have negative time off balances, and choose the max amount of negative hours (for ex: max of -24 hours)
- Should negative balances be rolled into the following period: if you selected for allowing negative balances, you can choose if you'd like those negative balance to be rolled into the next accrual period
5. Approvals
Enabling approvals allows you to control who needs to approve time off requests. If approval is not enabled, time off for this policy will be automatically approved.
- Enable time off request approval: If selected (typically this is the case), you can then select who needs to approve the policy with the options of "Manager", "Specific person", or "Specific permission group." If multiple people need to approve, click the "Add" button to include additional decision-makers.
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How should outstanding requests be resolved: decide how you want the system to handle time-off requests that have not been approved or denied (e.g. you can tell Sapling to Auto-Approve or Auto-deny requests after X number of days)
- Time off requests will automatically be approved or denied based on this setting regardless of the status of any other approval chains set up (example below)
Policy defined with 2 levels of approval (1st = Manager, 2nd = HR team) and with auto-approve after 3 days. If the request is not fully approved by the 3 day mark (by BOTH the manager and the HR team) then the request will automatically be approved.
Frequently Asked Questions💡
1. When we assign the policy to our existing employees, is the amount prorated?
No, for existing employees we need to do a Time Off Import. You will need to upload the desired total credit balance to be available for your team members.
To do this, run a report to pull all of your company emails. Export them to a spreadsheet, and add two data columns: Opening Balance and Effective Date. In the Opening Balance column, put the policy credit amount and this will have to be in hours. In the Effective Date column, put the date in MM-DD-YYYY format. Lastly, turn on the policy and upload the balance. This policy will now be available for your team to use.
2. How can I confirm that the balances were uploaded correctly?
As a best practice, we recommend running a test with one employee and then going to their profile and referencing the adjustment made to confirm the balance. You can view this in two places:
- Time Off Estimator
- Time Off Historical Tab
3. How can we modify the current balance or delete an adjustment?
You can always make adjustments to the balance to showcase the accurate balance. In addition, you can delete adjustments if they were incorrect.
For instance, if an accrual happens on Sept 10th, and an employee got added to a policy on Sep 7th, the employee would only receive a balance for the 7th to the 10th.
In this scenario, the time-off policy will be removed and the balance will be gone.
For instance, Nick's location is 'San Francisco (HQ)' in Sapling, and Nick has all the time off policies smart assigned for this location. Nick got promoted and People Ops Team changed location to 'San Francisco' by mistake or intentionally.
Yes, if the start date was changed before the first accrual then the accrual should occur on the basis of the new date. However, if the start date was changed after the first accrual was assigned then the time-off balances for new hires would need to be updated manually.