iAttendance · Guide
Leave management
Define leave types, grant allowances, approve requests and track the balance report.
Leave Management ✅ Before you start
- Your leave policy: which types exist, how many days a year, how they accrue.
- Staff already created in the User Manager module.
🧭 Step by step
⚙️ Define your leave types
Leave Management › Leave Config
Open "Leave Config". The grid has the columns "Name", "Value" and "Type". Press ➕ to open the "Add Leave Config" dialog.
A common misunderstanding: you do NOT create one row per leave type. The "Name" field is fixed to "Leave Type", and the "Value" field is where you list every type separated by semicolons — for example: Annual; MC; Unpaid.
Press "Save". You get "Create config successfully" and the dialog closes itself.
🔔 Choose who gets notified
Leave Management › Leave Config
Still in the config area, set who should be notified when a new leave request arrives.
Managers then hear about requests instead of having to go looking for them.
📅 Grant leave allowance
Leave Management › Set Leave Allow
Open "Set Leave Allow" to set how many days each person is entitled to.
You can grant by group to cover a whole department at once.
✅ Approve requests
Leave Management › Leave Plan
Staff submit from the staff portal ("Leave" › "Apply Leave"). A new request is created with status "New".
In the company portal open "Leave Plan", press the query button to load the grid, find the row and right-click to approve. The status becomes "Approved" and the grid refreshes itself.
Approved something by mistake? Un-approve it to send it back to pending.
- Pair this with Telegram notifications so you hear about new requests immediately.
- Double-click a row to open the "Leave Plan" detail dialog — its message history records who approved and when, which settles disputes quickly.
📜 Look back through the request history
Leave Management › Leave History
"Leave History" lets you filter back through everything already processed — by leave type and by date range — with each request status, start date, end date and note.
This is where you go to check individual records. When you want totals per person rather than request-by-request detail, use "Leave Report" in the next step.
📊 Read the Leave Report
Leave Management › Leave Report
The report answers the question every manager asks at year end: who has taken how much, and how much is still owed to them. Open "Leave Management" › "Leave Report", pick a "Select Year", optionally narrow by "Group" and "Owner (Email)" — both default to "All" — and press "Query".
The result is a summary grid with one row per staff member, showing "Year", "Email" and "Name". Any of the three columns can be sorted by clicking its header.
Click a row and it expands into a sub-table underneath, with one line per leave type you configured: "Email", "Year", "Leave Type", "Total Spent" and "Total Allow". Click the row again to collapse it. That sub-table is the useful part — it breaks the person down by leave type instead of giving you one lump figure.
- "Total Allow" comes straight from "Set Leave Allow" — it is the policy entitlement plus any carry-forward for that year and that leave type.
- "Total Spent" counts approved leave only, and it is half-day aware: a morning-only or afternoon-only day counts as 0.5, a full day as 1.
- The search box above the grid filters as you type and matches on name or e-mail. Ctrl+F jumps straight into it.
- When somebody has taken more than they were granted, the "Total Spent" figure is shown in bold red so it stands out as you scan the list.
- Every configured leave type gets a line even when nothing has been taken, so a row of "0.0 / 0.0" is normal — it means the type exists but this person has neither an allowance nor any approved leave for that year.
- Only approved leave is counted. Requests still waiting, rejected, expired or deleted contribute nothing, so the report will not match a raw count of submitted requests.
- The report has no export button — it is a read-on-screen summary. Use "Leave History" when you need to work through individual records.
🏖️ How employees book leave
User portal › Leave › Apply Leave
Staff have four leave screens of their own. "Apply Leave" is the one they use most: the form opens with their company, the first leave type and today in both "From Date" and "To Date". They set the dates, choose "Kind" — Full, AM or PM — add an optional "Note" and press "Apply".
There is no draft stage. The request saves straight away, appears in "Your Leave Plan" underneath, and your approvers are notified. While it is still unapproved the employee can edit or delete it from the "Actions" column; once a manager approves it, both buttons grey out.
The other three screens are for looking things up. "Leave History" queries their own past and future requests by type and date range, "Leave Plan" is a read-only roster of who else in their group is away, and "My Leave Summary" totals the days they have taken per leave type for a chosen year.
- A half day counts as 0.5 — that is the same arithmetic the company-side Leave Report uses.
- "Leave Plan" is what stops two people booking the same week off without noticing.
- Only approved leave counts towards the totals, so a request still waiting will not appear in the summary.
- On "My Leave Summary" the "Total Allow" column currently reads 0 for every leave type. The correct entitlement is the one on the company-side Leave Report, so use that when an employee asks what they have left.
- An approved request can no longer be changed by the employee. Withdrawing it after approval is a manager action.
❓ Frequently asked questions
1 Where do staff submit leave requests?
In the staff portal. Requests appear in "Leave Plan" in the company portal for a manager to approve.
2 How many leave types can I define?
As many as your policy needs — they all go into one semicolon-separated "Value" list under the fixed "Leave Type" name.
3 How do I undo an approval?
Reopen the request in "Leave Plan" and un-approve it; it returns to pending.
Note that while a request is "Approved" the "Delete" item in the right-click menu is disabled — un-approve first if you need to remove it.
4 Where do I see someone’s remaining days?
In "Leave Report", which totals days used and remaining per person.
5 Can I grant allowance to a whole department at once?
Yes. Create the group in User Manager first, then grant by group.
6 🌐 Can somebody outside the company approve a leave request?
No — leave approval is always carried out by a company user. Every leave request carries an approver e-mail that has to belong to an account in your portal, and approvers act on the request from the company portal or from the link in their notification e-mail.
The external approver portal at https://iattendance.co/externallogin is a TimeLog feature only. Once an external approver signs in there they see "List Timelogs", "History" and "Information" — there is no leave queue on that page at all. Its purpose is to let a client or an outsourcing partner sign off timesheets without holding a portal account.
If an outside person genuinely has to approve leave, give them a company account and narrow down what they can reach with the Permissions module. That keeps one single, auditable approval trail instead of two. The step-by-step external approver flow is documented in the TimeLog guide.