Benefits of using an online leave management system

Managing staff leave can be complicated and time consuming. There are many different types of leave, which means recording many leave balances at each individual pay rate.

The thing is, it needs to be easy for your people to take leave, and take it correctly. Employers that make mistakes in managing staff leave are hardly going to endear themselves to their teams. 

Imagine a manager mistakenly telling a staff member they aren’t entitled to take leave - a business that makes these types of administrative errors can expect to have trouble retaining good people. 

Fortunately, modern employee leave management is made much easier and more foolproof with the help of specialist software.

An employee leave management system is used to record staff leave balances and handle leave requests. 

This includes all types of leave, helping your people and managers to see what they’re entitled to, project future leave balances, and enabling businesses to see the obligations they have to their people.

It also communicates leave information to payroll so when your people take time off, they’re paid appropriately. 

Your main goal in managing staff leave is for it to be easy. This is one of the biggest benefits of employee leave management software, and it’s seen in a few different ways:

Whether it’s staff or managers, users want the basic information visible from the outset. Leave balances should be clear and obvious, and managers should be able to process leave requests while also seeing colleagues’ availability to ensure there is sufficient coverage.

Different organisations and businesses have different leave policies and entitlements, so your leave management software needs to be able to accommodate this. Leave types, policies and holiday lists should be able to be customised easily and reliably.

Cloud-based systems allow users to access from anywhere, without having to worry about the hassle of software or app installations and updates. 

This is a critical feature that drastically reduces the time your people have to put into managing employee time off entitlements. Automated leave balance updates allows users to see what individuals are owed in real time, which is a huge benefit compared to manual systems.

Leave management doesn’t exist in isolation - it impacts payroll, financial reporting and other aspects of the business. Software that integrates into other programs such as Xero eliminates additional work, creating even greater benefits.

Having built-in reporting capabilities allows HR managers to analyse patterns and learn about how people use their leave. This helps organisations to optimise their processes to get the best of team members and overall performance.

Time off management is a basic function of leave management, but there are a range of leave entitlements that need to be calculated and tracked all at once:

• Paid and unpaid leave status, including both at the current time and projections for a time in the future.
• Annual leave. Perhaps the most important information from an employee perspective, and the figure they’ll be interested in most of the time.
• Sick leaves. Clearly, staff will often be unwell when they’re taking sick leave. It should be easy and painless to avoid making them feel even worse!
• Public holidays should be updated automatically, particularly when looking forward. The Christmas/New Year period is a common example.
• Otherwise working days, when an employee would have worked, but for reasons such as it being a public holiday, sick day or annual holiday.
• Bereavement leave, which should also be simple for staff to use at a sensitive time.
• Parental leave. This is a fast-changing area of staff entitlements and businesses are increasingly offering their own policies to attract and retain good people.

Read more: Parental leave management - what you need to know.

• Other types of leave, including one-off workplace holiday policies such as staff birthdays, and customisable time off tracking.

Staff and managers use employee leave management systems differently, but they both have the same needs. They want it to be simple and straightforward, and do what they need it to.

Like any administrative task, requesting and approving leave should be fast and easy, so users can get back to doing priority tasks. This is where employee leave management software comes into its own, with a range of features for all users.

Automated leave approval or denial can be set up based on specific factors, notifying both parties and linking to online calendars in the process. This is particularly useful for large organisations with thousands of people, and large approval workloads. 

Leave management is a shared process involving staff, their manager and an organisation’s HR department. Software becomes a shared home for all users, including remote staff or users from different locations or offices.

Having greater visibility of leave balances allows individuals, managers and HR teams to get the information they need at a glance. Employee leave management software helps to avoid mishaps and miscalculations by making the most important information available and universal.

Different users have different goals and priorities - for example, an individual wants to know how much leave they have owing, and an HR manager may want to calculate the workplace’s overall leave balance.

Information should be clear and obvious, and easy to use and process. Leave is ultimately a simple concept, and the processes around it should be user friendly also.

Smartly makes it simple for organisations to pay people on time, as they should be, and in line with regulations. This includes accurately tracking and managing leave entitlements without requiring manual input.

Read more: The employer’s guide to public holidays

Smartly take care of compliance and security so organisations stay on the right ride of HR and privacy regulations. 

Above all else, Smartly exists to make all aspects of payroll simple. It automates leave calculations and processes to make managing leave more reliable and less time consuming. 

This allows organisations to drastically reduce time spent calculating leave manually, and gives you the confidence that staff entitlements are tracked and updated as they should be.  

Smartly’s self-service portal gives your people the power to get all the information they need at their fingertips. The easy to use app allows all staff to manage their leave from anywhere.

Find out more about how to sort your leave management with Smartly, including with a free demo today. 

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If you want to learn more about how your day-to-day tasks can be made simpler, you can chat to us to get some insight on how payroll software could benefit your business. Smartly can make the complex tasks seem simple including payroll, timesheets, leave and more! Smartly takes care of most of the faffing, so you can focus on the important stuff.

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