Leave balances and carry-forward: the rules a small services firm needs
Leave goes wrong in small firms for the same reason timesheets do: the rules live in someone's head. Write them down as data instead: leave types with a yearly allotment, a carry-forward policy per type, half-day support, public holidays and weekly offs excluded from the count, and a named approver for every person. The balance then calculates itself, and the team calendar shows who is away before a client call is booked.
CrewClock team20 October 2026 5 min read
Leave types, not one bucket
Annual leave, sick leave and casual or personal leave behave differently. Annual leave is planned and often carries forward; sick leave is unplanned and usually does not; unpaid leave reduces pay. Each type needs its own allotment per year and its own rule, and each needs a colour on the calendar so the manager can read a month at a glance.
Counting days correctly
A request from Thursday to Tuesday is not six days. The count should exclude:
- the person's weekly off days (which may differ from the company default),
- public holidays in the organisation's calendar,
- and should allow a half day, first or second half, on a single date.
Carry-forward: three honest policies
There are only three policies that are easy to explain, and the choice is per leave type:
- None: the balance resets on 1 January (or the financial year start).
- All: the unused days move to next year in full.
- Capped: up to a fixed number of days move, the rest lapse.
Approval and the calendar
Every person should have one named leave approver, with a backup for when the approver is away. The approver sees the request with the current balance and the team calendar for those dates, so a second person from the same client team is not approved for the same week by accident.
Approved leave should feed the rest of the system: timesheet reminders skip those days, payroll treats paid and unpaid types differently, and attendance shows the day as leave rather than absent.
Joiners, leavers and pro-rating
Someone who joins in July does not get a full year's annual leave. Pro-rate the allotment by months employed in the year, round to the nearest half day, and show the calculation on the balance screen so nobody has to ask.
How CrewClock does it
CrewClock has leave types with paid or unpaid flags, yearly balances per person, carry-forward set to none, all or capped per type, half days, and public holidays and weekly offs skipped automatically in the count. Requests go to the person's approver with the balance and the team calendar on the same screen. Approved leave is read by the timesheet reminder, by payroll and by attendance.
Frequently asked
- Can we allow negative balances?
- It is better to create an unpaid leave type for the overflow than to let a paid type go negative; the slip then shows the deduction clearly.
- How do we handle a public holiday that falls on a weekly off?
- Treat it as a holiday only if the organisation gives a replacement day; otherwise it simply does not count.
- Who should approve the approver's leave?
- Their own manager, or the organisation owner. Every person needs one approver, including approvers.
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