Leave Balance Limits: Automated handling of negative leave balances
What’s new?
We're excited to introduce Leave Balance Limits, a new feature designed to give you greater control, flexibility, and financial oversight when managing your team's leave requests.
You can now set specific thresholds on leave policies to prevent employees from accruing excessive negative balances, ensuring your leave management process is compliant with your company’s policies and reduces the time spent on manual reviews.
What is it?
Leave Balance Limits allow you to configure rules directly within your leave policies. Here’s what you can do:
- Set custom balance limits: Define specific positive or negative leave balance thresholds for each leave policy.
- Choose your enforcement style: Either automatically block employees from submitting requests that exceed the limit, or warn and allow the request to proceed while instantly notifying the manager for review.
- Gain granular control: Because limits are set at the policy level, you can have different rules for different leave types - for example, stricter limits on paid time off versus more flexible rules for sick leave.
How does it work?
As a system administrator or manager you can set up leave balance limits in the leave policy builder. These are the steps to set things up:
1. Select Business Settings from the drop-down menu under your name on the top right of the web page.
2. Click on the Leave policies tab
3. To edit an existing policy, hover over the policy and click Edit. Alternatively to create a new leave policy entirely, select Create leave policy
4. In the leave policy configuration, scroll down to the 'Balance options' section and select Leave request balance limit so that it opens the setting 'Set balance limit for leave requests'
5. Configure your limit settings:
- Set balance limit in days: Enter a positive or negative value for the limit. This figure will act as the minimum allowable balance for this leave policy. Example: to allow your team members to go into 2 days' negative leave balance, enter -2 in this field.
Action when limit exceeded: Choose one of the following options:
- Block requests that exceed limit: Prevents employees from submitting leave requests that would exceed the set limit
- Allow requests that exceed limit and notify managers: Permits the leave request to be submitted and notifies the assigned manager
6. Save your leave policy changes
Further information
For further details on setup, principles, and other FAQs please read our Help Article.
Callouts
Leave balance limits for future leave years will not be supported for this version.
For this release, the system applies limits only to leave requests with start dates in the current calendar year. Leave requests starting in the next calendar year will bypass these restrictions and be processed normally.
Availability
This feature will be rolled out progressively to all eligible customers starting in October 2025.
Once available, you will find the new settings within your existing Leave Policy configuration page.
To learn exactly how to set up and use Leave Balance Limits, please read our detailed guide.
If you would like earlier access to Leave Balance Limits, please fill out this Google Form.
