How to easily manage expiring balances: Statutory and above statutory

This article explains how to manage two absence balances—one for statutory leave and one for above statutory leave.

With two absence balances for vacation—one covering the statutory balance and the other covering above statutory leave—you can use either of the two methods described below to manage employee absence requests.

Understanding the current configuration

Following the migration process, vacation requests will initially be deducted from the statutory balance. Once the statutory balance is depleted, it will go negative and continue to do therefore you should decide for your organization to follow one of the two methods highlighted below.

Company-wide, you should decide on a method and implement it consistently across the organization.

Available Methods

Both methods lead to the same end result, Method 1 requires ongoing manual adjustments throughout the year, while Method 2 is less work during the year and involves a bulk correction at year-end. Choose the method that best fits your organization's workflow.

Method 1: Adjusting Absence Requests on the go once Statutory Balance has expired

In this method, once an employee's statutory leave balance has been exhausted, you will manually adjust the absence request during the approval process. When approving the request, you assign a portion of the leave to the above statutory balance.

This method requires you to check the employee’s available leave balance during each absence request and adjust it accordingly. Since it involves ongoing manual adjustments, it is more transparent than Method 2 but also more time-consuming.

On any leave request using more then the current statutory balance remaining for an employee, you can edit a day or multiple to be deduced from the above statutory balance as shown in the screenshot:

This method requires you to check the employee’s available leave balance during each absence request and adjust it accordingly. Since it involves ongoing manual adjustments, it is more transparent than Method 2 but also more time-consuming.

Method 2: Correcting the Statutory Balance into the Above Statutory Balance at the End of the year

In this method, you approve all absence requests without adjusting the leave balance during the year, even if the statutory balance goes negative. At the end of the year, you make a correction to transfer the negative statutory balance to the above statutory balance.

This correction ensures that the employee’s statutory leave balance is reset to zero by the end of the year, while the above statutory balance reflects the appropriate amount. If the employee hasn’t used their full statutory balance, no correction is needed. The remaining balance will carry over into the new year as remaining balance on statutory on its own as well as the remaining balance in above statutory carrying over. Both remaining balances will then follow the expiration per balance.

To do the correction at the end of the year you can follow these steps:

1. Use the Bulk-Action: Correct balances on all employees with two balances

2. Set the date on 31.12 of the year

3. select the Statutory Balance and choose the action: Transfer to Above Statutory Balance

4. Select the Correction Type: increase balance to and set the target correction value to “0”

5. click on Recalculate

   1. At the bottom of the page, you will see a table listing employees with negative statutory balances. A correction will be applied to bring their statutory balance back to zero.

   2. Click Change to finalize the correction. The correction will deduct the appropriate amount from the above statutory balance.

1. You are done, your employees now have 0 statutory Leave remaining, and will have a correctly reduced above statutory balance - any remaining balance here will follow the expiration time period you have configured for this balance.

This method overall is less work during the year and leads to the same outcome at the end, just like Method 1.