What a leave management system contains
Four parts make up a working system. Policy: leave types (earned, casual, sick, comp-off, maternity, leave without pay), entitlement per type, accrual frequency, carry-forward and lapse rules, and the holiday calendar each policy uses. Balances: opening balance, accrued, taken, pending and available per employee, visible to the employee. Workflow: request, approval chain, cancellation and the notifications that move a request along. Integration: the hand-off of approved leave and LOP into attendance and payroll.
A product that has only the workflow part is a request form. A product with policy and balances but no attendance link still leaves HR reconciling leave against present days every month. The leave management system buyer's guide explains how to test for all four.
- Policy engine: leave types, accrual, carry-forward, lapse, encashment, holiday calendars
- Balances per employee, updated on accrual and on every approved or cancelled request
- Request and approval workflow with attachments, multi-level approvers and an audit trail
- Attendance and payroll link so paid leave and LOP need no re-entry
India specifics the system must handle
Leave rules in India come from the Factories Act for factories and from each state's Shops and Establishments Act for shops and offices, so a company with units in more than one state needs more than one policy running at once. Factory earned leave accrues at one day for every 20 days worked, after 240 days in a calendar year, with carry-forward up to 30 days; state S&E Acts set their own earned, casual and sick leave. Maternity leave under the Maternity Benefit Act is 26 weeks for the first two children, with an 80-day eligibility test.
On top of the statutory layer sit the company rules that generate most disputes: the sandwich rule, comp-off with expiry, half-day leave, and how leave without pay is applied when balances run out. Each of these must be configurable per policy, not hard-coded for one market.
How it links to attendance and payroll
An approved leave becomes a paid day in the attendance record for that date, and the attendance system must stop treating that day as an absence. An unapproved absence, or leave requested after balances are exhausted, becomes loss of pay that payroll deducts at the per-day rate. Leave approved for a day the employee was then marked present should raise a conflict, not silently pay both.
The month-end output is a per-employee count of paid leave days, LOP days and, where applicable, encashable balance, in the format the payroll run consumes. Without that link, the same numbers are typed twice, once by HR and once by accounts, and they will differ.
A machine operator in a Pune plant requests casual leave on Saturday and Monday; Sunday is his weekly off. The company's policy applies the sandwich rule to casual leave, so the system deducts three days from his balance and shows him the deduction before he submits. He has four casual leaves left, so the request is allowed. The shift in-charge gets a warning because the operator is already on the published Monday roster, approves anyway, and the roster shows the gap. At month end the attendance register shows two CL days and one WO-as-leave day, all paid, and no LOP.
Attend Mitra's leave module runs leave policies with accrual, paid, casual and sick types, balances visible in the employee app, approval workflow with notifications, a holiday calendar, and LOP that flows into attendance-linked payroll. The roster builder warns when someone with approved leave is rostered.