How to track leave and prevent calendar clashes

• Request: the employee enters the type and dates of leave.
• Approval: the request goes to the manager; approval or refusal is recorded.
• Calendar: approved leave appears on the team calendar.
• Balance: used and remaining entitlement is updated.
• Payroll: data goes to the pay calculation according to the leave type.

Example scenario: Picture an engineering practice in Ankara. When summer comes, most of the team asks for the same weeks. Requests pile up in the corridor, in the WhatsApp group, and on a list on the manager's desk. In mid-July, with a project deadline approaching, someone notices there will be nobody left in the office. The real job of tracking software is to bring this scatter into one place. Wherever a request comes from, it lands on the same record; the manager sees the team calendar while approving, and HR sees approved leave while preparing payroll.

The employee asks the manager in passing, and the manager says yes. HR is not told, or is told weeks later. On payroll day that leave is either not posted or posted as the wrong type. The remaining balance then becomes an argument at year end. The remaining balance is a problem of its own. The employee asks HR how many days are left, HR checks the file, and the file does not know about leave carried over from last year. The same question is asked again and again during the year, and the answer comes out a little different each time.

Paper on its own is not the issue; the issue is that the record is not in one place. Until the person who takes the request, the one who approves it, and the one who runs payroll see the same record, leave lives in someone's memory. And when that person goes on leave, the leave records go on holiday with them.

At the Ankara practice the problem lies in the timing rather than in how much leave people take. If engineers on the same project ask for the same week and each is approved on their own, the manager sees each request in isolation, never the calendar as a whole.

What counts as a clash varies from company to company. Measures companies often use include:

• At least one person in the same role stays at work.
• Leave is refused or limited in a project's delivery week.
• Requests for the busy season are collected in advance.
• Requests next to public holidays are handled in turn.

In Corex360 a leave request goes to the manager for approval. The approval is logged with who gave it and when. At the Ankara practice, the manager talks to the employee before approving a request that falls in delivery week. The dates shift, the office is not empty that week, and the decision stays on record.

In a small company the request goes straight to the manager. In a larger structure the team lead looks first, then the department head. Whatever the structure, a verbal approval is not a record; saying at month end that you approved it proves nothing.

An approval chain also has a speed. If a request waits days for approval, the employee cannot plan or book tickets, and in the end falls back on a verbal yes. When the request reaches the manager straight away, the wait gets shorter. The approval record pays off later too. When unused leave has to be calculated as an employee leaves, which leave was taken when, and who approved it, should be beyond dispute.

In Corex360, leave, advance, and overtime requests go through the same approval flow in the HR module. We describe the HR software side of this flow separately, through a day in the life of a finance and HR lead.

Paid leave, unpaid leave, sick leave, and excused leave (marriage, birth, bereavement) are handled differently in payroll. If the type is entered wrongly or not at all, the payroll error surfaces at month end.

Excused leave and half-day leave need extra care here. The employee leaves after lunch and the attendance system records an early departure; without a leave record, that early departure looks like a gap, and at month end the employee is asked to explain it. In Corex360 approved leave sits on the staff card, and clock-in records from the attendance device sit on the same card.

The team calendar shows who is off on which day; it does not need to show why. An employee's sick note should not be known to everyone who can see the calendar. Showing them as on leave is enough for the team to plan. Part of fairness is consistency. If one request is approved and another refused in the same busy week, the reason should be on record; a refusal without a reason erodes trust in the team.

In Corex360 access is role-based and logged. Fairness comes from the same record: when leave decisions are visible on the calendar, the argument about who got what rests on the record, not on guesswork. We expand on measuring from the record on the measure the team fairly page.

A leave request goes to the manager for approval in the Corex360 HR module; leave, advance, and overtime requests pass through the same approval flow. The approval is recorded with who gave it and when. Approved leave sits on the employee card, and the clock-in and clock-out record from the attendance device is on the same card. So an employee who leaves at midday on a half-day leave does not show up as a gap at month end.

Under the PDKS heading, the HR module has screens for clock-in and clock-out, shift management, overtime tracking, attendance tracking, timesheets and the leave calendar. Request flows cover leave, advance, travel allowance and payment requests. In the approval center, attendance events such as a late clock-in or a clock-out away from the location also come up for approval, with the employee's explanation and department on the record. Leave balance calculation is not promised.