Overview
Leave is where HR’s credibility is won or lost, because leave is the one number every employee tracks independently. If the balance on the screen does not match the balance in their head, they will trust their own count — and they will usually have a point, because in a spreadsheet the entitlement was a flat number, the carry-over was done by hand, and nobody recorded that the December request was cancelled.
In Nama, a balance is not a number somebody maintains. It is the result of a leave type’s rules applied to one employee’s service.
A leave type is a rulebook, not a label
“Annual” and “Sick” are not names in this system, they are configurations. Each vacation type decides:
- When entitlement is credited — at the start of the year taking the joining date into account, at the start of the year regardless of it, or accruing with each month as it passes.
- How much — a flat number of days, or, better, a seniority table so a two-year employee and a fifteen-year employee are not entitled to the same leave.
- How long a single absence may be, and how high the accumulated balance may climb before it stops growing.
- How much service must pass before the leave can be taken at all — and, for once-in-a-career leave such as marriage or pilgrimage, how many times it may ever be taken.
One class is special: annual leave. The rest of HR keys off it — service-period maths, final settlement and the seniority table all read the annual class, while other types are free-form buckets you define yourself.
Request, then document
Leave follows the same two beats as everything else in HR. A vacation request carries the dates and waits for a decision; it changes no balance. A vacation document is what actually consumes the days and marks the absence, and it can be generated straight from an accepted request — after which the request is closed, so one approval cannot become two absences. Where an organisation does not want an approval step, the document is entered directly.
What happens to the days nobody took
This is the part that spreadsheets get wrong, and it is where the year’s liability actually sits.
- Transfer carries a balance into the new HR year, under the leave type’s own carry-forward policy rather than under whoever is doing it.
- Compensation pays days out instead of taking them. The value of a day can be entered, or calculated from the employee’s own salary data for the period using the same engine that prices salary components — so a cash-out is priced the way the payslip is priced.
- Adjustment corrects a balance deliberately and leaves a document behind saying who corrected it.
- Holiday and rest-day compensation turns days actually worked on a weekend or a public holiday into balance, which is how an operation that never closes stays fair to the people who kept it open.
Because all four write to the same balance the requests read, the number an employee sees is the number the company owes. At the end of service, that balance is part of the settlement rather than a negotiation.
The leave types, the seniority table, the request-to-document flow and all four balance movements are documented in the vacations section.
