Gain more control of your annual leave policies, with new functionality: minimum notice period
We are happy to share with you new functionality to give you more control and flexibility when it comes to managing the annual leaves. With this new functionality, you will set the number of days before making the leave request.
Previously than with this option, the employees could book any leave type starting the actual day. With the new feature, the staff will only be able to request time off after several days. In this way, the company’s planning will be more efficient, and the managers will have more time to respond to the staff’s requests.
It is essential to mention that companies have policies that request to submit the leave requests — let’s say seven days before the requested time-off date, and LeaveBoard allows for such configuration. Moreover, the setup will work not only on the web-app but also within the vacation tracking Slack chatbot for every employee request. And there are no limits on what this minimum notice period is. It could remain 0, or you can make it 7, 21, or 30 days. It’s up to you to decide.
And if you don’t need to activate this option, it is also ok. For example, we recommend that for Sick leave policies, keep the minimum to 0 days in advance, and eventually activate the option of allowing employees to book days retroactively. I.e., to book some sick days that happened last week; however, they could not add the days in the system.
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What are the benefits?
By adding this buffer period, you’re giving your managers some time to reflect on this request. They have all the data available to make informed decisions (who else is out, what is the employee’s allowance, besides knowing what the upcoming tasks are). Employee leaves of absences impact not only the overall payroll but also the performance of a business. When leave tracking and recording works smoothly and retrieves the information whenever you need it, the HR and Finance departments will be delighted with the new ways of working.
- 10x better than spreadsheets. Spreadsheets don’t do offer you the possibility to set such policies. The minimum number of days option secures a more efficient way to manage leave requests is within the company, following specific company rules or national regulations.
▶️ Read more aboutThe comparison between Excel absence tracking sheets and cloud-based leave tracking software.
- Improve business transparency. When all the workforce knows about this new rule and starts using it, planning absences will be better for the business from a timing point of view. Since submitting on the last day is no longer a valid option; business continuity will be easier to maintain. And the vacation calendar is there to help. Everyone will be able to see who is at work and who is absent. And when they plan to take some days out, they will know if there is someone else who scheduled leave of absence.
- Increase consistency and compliance. These settings are automatically implemented across your organization consistently for every employee leave request. In this way, you increase compliance.
- It supports the payroll work. By eliminating the last-minute absence records, you will not have surprises that a new absence appears just after you made the payment at the end of the pay period. If all requests must have at least seven days to be recorded in advance, you avoid such glitches.
- Gain extra decisional time. Another benefit for employees is that if someone decides to cancel a request or postpone it, they will have more time to reflect on this decision and submit the new request.
- Be open. For sure, emergencies can happen; however, their frequency is shallow compared to the days of leave, which employees by default can take through the year. With LeaveBoard, you can allow employees at the same time to register time-off retroactively (i.e., that happened in the past).
TIP
Interested about more benefits for using Leave Management within your SMB? 👈🏽 In one of our most popular article, we present 12 reasons to do so.___
Total flexibility of the annual leave policies
The leave management system provides control of the dynamic functionalities. Think about the leave automation that runs every time an employee requests time-off. And consider the time gained because the HR processes are applied consistently across the company to ensure compliance and eliminate errors when you use an annual leave management system.
The minimum notice period to request leave is just one of ten options you can choose from regarding a leave policy. And here, we didn’t count the multitude of automatic workflows linked with the feature.
We support HR innovation and want to provide novel experiences for each part of it. We believe that controlling leave policies is critical in running any business, and at LeaveBoard we provide you the simple tools to manage your employees’ absences successfully.









