What is left, and the day three people all booked LEAVE

Leave goes wrong twice, and both are arithmetic

The balance is wrong because it is kept in days. Days are fine while everybody works the same day. The moment somebody works four days a week, or a mix of nine-hour and seven-hour shifts, a day stops being a fixed amount: half a day off for a person on a nine-hour shift is not half a day off for a person on a seven-hour one. Run that through a year of bookings and the balance is most of a week adrift, always in the employer's favour for some people and the other way for others, and nobody can reconstruct how.

So everything here is held in hours underneath and displayed in whatever unit you asked for. The conversion happens once, at the edge, rather than at every booking. That is the only way a part-time entitlement comes out right, and it is why pro-rata entitlement is calculated from hours rather than by taking a fraction of a number of days.

The cover is wrong because approval is one request at a time. Each request is looked at by somebody considering that request, and it is fine. Nobody is looking at the fourteenth of August across all eleven people until the fourteenth of August, and by then three of them are away and two of those bookings were approved months ago and cannot reasonably be withdrawn.

So every day of the year is checked

Set the number of people you actually need on a given day and the days where you go under are listed, before anybody books, not after. That changes the conversation from “your leave is refused” to “that week is already thin, would the following one work”, which is a conversation people accept because it is visibly about the rota rather than about them.

Be honest about the minimum rather than optimistic. The number you need is the number that covers the work with somebody off sick, not the number that just about works if nothing happens. A rota with no slack shows as fine right up to the morning it is not.

The things that quietly break a leave year

Decide what happens to public holidays and write it down. Whether they come out of the entitlement or sit on top of it changes the number by about a week and a half, and it is the most common source of a dispute that nobody can settle because nobody wrote it down.

Set the carry-over rule explicitly, including what happens to a balance somebody could not take because you refused it. A person who was told no three times in November has a claim that a person who simply did not book does not.

Pro-rata a mid-year joiner and leaver from hours, and recalculate when somebody's hours change rather than at the end of the year: a person who goes from five days to three in June has two different entitlements in one year, and treating it as one is how a final payment ends up wrong.

Everything stays in this browser, which for a file of who is off when and why is worth knowing: it is personal data and there is no copy of it anywhere else, so export it and keep it the way you keep the rest of the personnel record. Nearby: ROSTER builds the rota itself, ONCALL works out who is on, TIMESHEET turns hours into what they come to, and CAPACITY answers what the team can actually take on once the leave is in.