What is Leave Management Software?
Leave management software is a system application that is designed to manage employee leaves and attendance, leave balance, hr leave policies, and holiday calendar lists. The modern leave attendance management system comes in the form of a web-based application that can run on any operating device. It also enables employees to apply and keep tabs on the number of leaves taken by them.
Leave management System Integrated with basic modules
Online Leave Management System
An online Leave management system is also known as the cloud-based leave management software. With this software, employees can apply for leaves from their work desk or home. It helps to refer to a system through which the company HR management can accurately allocate, track, approve or reject leaves.
Modules of Leave Management Software
Leave Application System
An essential module of the leave management system, it allows employers to easily process employee leave requests with it. You can integrate your company’s holiday calendar and leave policies seamlessly with the employee monitoring solutions to better support and monitor employee time off. Moreover, you can design myriad types of leaves such as vacation leave, sick leave, maternity leave, paternity leave, childcare leave, etc. Furthermore, you can configure rules with respect to the regulation of these leaves in adherence to company and state policies.
Reports
You can generate multiple reports with a graphical representation of leaves, holidays, weekends, and statuses. With employee tracking software, you can plan, manage and track employee availability. It also helps in the seamless integration with payroll, among other processes. You can also generate predefined and ad hoc reports based on employee leave data. For instance, leave reports related to the leave availed, leave encashment, negative leave balance, year-wise summary report, day-wise leave transaction report, and leave transaction report to name a few.
Leave Policy Definition
Under this module, multiple types of leaves are defined and configured such as personal leave, sick leave, casual leave, maternity leave, etc. You can define and enforce a different set of rules for different classes of employees (trainees, technicians, managers, branch managers, senior managers, regional heads, etc.) In addition, you can determine policies regarding clubbing of leaves based on location and the number of years served. Moreover, you can manage employee leaves based on the date of their joining.
Holidays and Restricted Holidays
You can design multiple holiday lists based on location, department and process within your organization by travel management software. For example, companies give holidays on the occasion of Onam and Pongal in South India. Similarly, Durga Puja is a huge festival in West Bengal & Bihar. Plus, you can also specify the restricted and official holidays, so that your employees can plan and choose the leaves they want to take.
Leave Planning/Balances
Good leave management software can generate leave cards through which employees can view their leaves – credited, taken, rejected, lapse, balances, etc. Managers usually have permission to view the leave cards of their subordinates so, that they’re appraised about the availability of their team members and can plan ahead accordingly. Also, through this solution, you can enable employees to view leave applications of their team members so that they can plan their leaves, allowing minimum disruption of work.
Leave Workflows
By employing a leave management software, the management of leave applications becomes like a walk in the park. Administration of leave applications encapsulates applying for leaves online, forwarding the application to the approver, intimating the approver, and the approver approving the leave and sending an alert to the employee. It also helps in linking the HR, employees and the manager through email where each entity receives a notification whenever an employee applies for leave.
Year-end Processing
This module found in various leave management software available in India consists of crunching numbers with respect to year-end accounting & adjustments related to encashment, carry-forward, etc.
Leave Management Software Features
Design and Management of Leave Policies
Top-notch leave management systems enable employers to design and manage leave policies. They can create rules and customise the policy with respect to accrual calculations, half-day leaves, clubbing of leaves, overutilization of leaves, short leaves, etc.
Balancing Leaves
Imagine you’re the company HR and a major holiday like Holi, Diwali or Christmas is coming up…and you’re getting leave requests from left, right, and centre! Heck, why imagine it? It happens every major holiday! With the assistance of a top-of-line leave management software, you can say goodbye to confusion. You can easily find records of past leave history of employees and balance them with their remaining leaves for the year easily. You’ll have access to all previous leave applications thereby, increasing transparency levels within the company. As an HR manager, you’ll be easily able to balance leaves taken by employees with the ones left in their leave bank.
Easy Access to FAQs about Company’s Leave Policies
It may seem trivial to you but having a set of FAQs that answers the oft-asked questions of employees like, Are Saturdays off? How many leaves can I take in a month? Does the company offer compensatory leaves? All these questions can easily be answered with FAQs without having to peruse the entire leave policy of the company. A good leave management system should ideally auto-generate these without you having to feed them in. This would eliminate the need to contact your HR or manager for clarity on leaves, as the information would already be displayed on every employee’s leave page. All an employee would have to do is click on the policy and voila! All of their questions will be answered. This helps save time and effort for both the employers and the employees!
Auto-Generate the List of Public and Company Holidays
Effective leave management software maintains a list of public and company holidays for easy access to employees. Herein, employers can save time by not having to send notifications to employees reminding them about the holiday. Usually, these holidays are fixed and occur every year, employees can generate/download a list having all the leaves incorporated in it. Firstly, it’ll save the effort of creating a new holiday list each year, as the employer can simply click and choose the leaves that must be implemented in his/her organisation.
Reduces Payroll Errors
Imagine having to manually keep tabs on leaves taken by employees and then subsequently calculate the amount due to them to run payroll. What if you had access to an auto-populated employee leave calendar that was integrated with your payroll management software? For one, it’ll make your life a hell of a lot simpler, as all calculations would take place automatically on the system. By having an online leave management system in place, you can ensure your data’s accuracy and iron out any errors that may result in the transfer of inaccurate salary or non-transfer of payroll. This will go a long way towards increasing the efficiency of your HR and reducing errors on the payroll.
Mobile Compatibility
The majority of online leave management systems in India offer a mobile version of their solution through which managers can apply, approve, reject or manage all leave-related tasks on their mobile phones. Whether it’s remote location-based attendance tracking, flexible working hours, claiming expenses, reimbursements, or leave applications – a mobile leave management software is nothing short of a boon.
Who Needs Leave Management Software?
Any kind of business establishment which has got employees on its payroll needs leave management software. Plain and simple, that’s the truth. Once an employee joins an organization, he is due to a certain stipulated number of leaves as per the company leave policy. To manage employee leaves, whether they’ve been approved or rejected, you need effective leave management software to keep on top of it. It doesn’t matter if you run a clothing store, fast-food outlet, a school, a hotel, or an MNC; you need a software solution to track the number of leaves availed by your workers. The basic purpose of any leave management software is the accurate tracking of leaves taken by employees and balancing them with their accrued leaves to process their payroll without committing any errors.
Importance of Leave Management Software
In today’s day and age, leave management software has become an integral part of all kinds of businesses. If you don’t want to face a scenario wherein you’ve been flooded with leave requests and are having a tough time coping, choose a system that helps you make sense of it all. You can plan to ensure work doesn’t suffer from employees taking vacations left, right, and center. The schedule leaves in such a manner that you’re not left shorthanded and can meet project deadlines on time.
Advantages of Leave Management System
Exact and accurate information
The foremost benefit of best leave management software is that it helps you readily access accurate information about employees’ leaves. Information such as the number of leaves taken by your workforce trends w.r.t. leaves, and leave balances at a moment’s notice. Rather than wasting your time with a tedious and long drawn-out process, you can gather all the requisite data through a single click and save yourself from filing through registers or gleaning Excel sheets. Also, when you have precise and correct information in your hands, generating payroll becomes a cool summer breeze.
Transparency
Since all information is readily available to both employees and managers, employees cannot complain about the lack of transparency. With a top-notch leave management system, they can easily check their leave history and leave balance. Moreover, it makes approving or rejecting leaves a more transparent process.
Empowers Employees with Self-service
We hope you realize that this isn’t an ideal scenario when your employees must run hither to thither to check their leave balance or get their leaves approved. So why not give your employees a self-service portal where they can execute all these tasks management without missing a beat? An employee self-service portal would first eliminate the need of having to approach the manager or HR for getting leave requests approved. This performance task management software acts as a single point of access to all employee data, helping make leave management convenient for both, employees as well as managers.
Raises awareness about leave policy
If you’re employing leave management software, you can send notifications and reminders about certain aspects of the leave policy. Aspects such as the maximum / minimum number of leaves an employee is permitted to avail, holiday calendar management as per location, and the number of days required before applying for planned or long leave. Employees should be encouraged to refer to the leave policy before applying for vacation days.
Assures compliance to leave policy
Having to leave compliance management software ensures compliance with the company’s leave policy. So, favoritism cannot come into play while applying for or approving leaves.
Visibility of employee availability
So, you’ve got a hot project and the deadline is looming like a swinging axe atop your head, what are you going to do? Precisely nothing. If you’ve got leave management software up and running, you can easily find out the availability of team members. This is essential information when it comes to meeting project deadlines. With this module, you can analyze the leave trend data of employees. You can prepare a leave schedule that would help you in approving or rejecting a leave request during crucial project delivery times without wasting time.
Adherence to law
Every country has laws pertaining to labor and the number of leaves they’re eligible for. And it’s the responsibility of the employer to adhere to these laws and ensure their compliance. If the firm fails to fulfill these requirements, it may leave them vulnerable to prosecution. You can avoid falling into this tangle by implementing a top leave management software, which is compliant with the local city and state laws as well.