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Setting up Leave Priorities

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Setting up Leave Priorities

Owned by michaella_Datacom
Last updated: Jan 17, 2025 by Jasmin Mortensen
3 min read

Leave Priority Functionality 

Leave priorities are a means of automatically deducting balances from another leave type when an employee may have exhausted their current leave entitlements. By enabling leave priorities, it can ensure that certain leave types and their balances are deducted before others, and that employees do not go into a negative leave balance.

The leave priority functionality in Datapay determines the order in which leave types are applied when an employee makes a leave request. If the balance for the first-level leave type is insufficient, the system will automatically move to the next leave type in the priority list and so on, provided sufficient balances are available.

Leave Priorities can be setup with two or three levels.

The first and second levels must be from the earn-and-take leave type.

The third leave type should always be a take leave type (e.g. LWOP). These leave types do not have a balance and therefore can never have a negative balance, allowing them to catch all remaining leave hours requested.

Leave Priority Workflow Example:

First Level: Time In Lieu Taken Second Level: Annual Leave Taken Third Level: Leave Without Pay (LWOP) Taken

Scenario 1
Request: 1 day of Time In Lieu
Balances: Time In Lieu (0.25 days), Annual Leave (0.25 days), LWOP (unlimited days).

  1. The system deducts 0.25 days of Time In Lieu.

  2. Next, it deducts 0.25 days of Annual Leave.

  3. Finally, 0.5 days of LWOP is applied to complete the request.

Scenario 2
Request: 1 day of Annual Leave.
Outcome: The leave priority settings do not apply.

This request does not match the first-level leave type (Time In Lieu).

A new leave priority (Annual Leave > Leave Without Pay) needs to be created to support this workflow.

Creating Leave Priorities in Datapay

  1. Navigate to the Company tab > Leave Types

  2. Right – Click on the Leave Type you wish to create a Leave Priority for and select “Create Leave Priority Group”

A new Leave Priority will appear as a new section beneath your existing Leave Types.

  1. To add further Leave Types, Select a Leave Type and drag it down to the correct position within the Leave Priority and release.

  2. Add and reorder further Leave Types as required until you have the desired order and then save your screen.

Enable Leave Priorities in Timesheets 

Payroll Administrators have the ability to enable Leave Priorities for use in Timesheets.

This setting can be found in the Pay Group tab > Timesheets, as shown below:

 

 

 

 

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