Absence types and public holidays

This is where you decide which kinds of time off your team can request, which ones deduct vacation, and which days aren’t worked. There are two screens: time-off types and holidays.

OrganizationTime trackingTime off

Before you start

Both screens can be edited by the Admin role, the built-in HR role and any role with the time-off and holiday permissions. The built-in Manager role no longer opens them.

Create a time-off type

Option	What it does
Allow document upload	The person can attach a file when requesting or editing the time off
Document required	Can only be checked if the previous option is. The request can't be submitted without a document, and Orquiva won't let anyone approve it without one
Deduct vacation days	Requests of this type are subtracted from the yearly vacation balance
Notified, not approved	It's approved when recorded and the manager is notified. It can start without an end date, like sick leave

There is no code field: Orquiva generates the internal code from the name and won’t accept two types with the same one.

The types you start with

Your company starts with six types: Vacation (the only one that deducts days), Absence, Remote work, Personal leave, Medical visit (document required) and Sick leave (document required; notified, not approved). You edit them like any other type.

Add statutory leaves creates, in one go, the paid leaves of articles 37.3 and 37.9 of Spain’s Workers’ Statute: marriage or civil partnership, accident or serious illness of a relative, death of a relative, moving house, unavoidable public duty, and family force majeure. The last one carries a cap of 4 Days per year. They are created as paid and without deducting vacation; any you already had are left alone.

How the vacation balance is deducted

Approving a request of a type with Deduct vacation days takes its days off that year’s balance. Only working days count: Saturdays, Sundays and the national holidays of your company’s country are skipped. A request that runs from one year into the next deducts from each year its own days.

Pending requests count too: the available balance already subtracts their days. If there aren’t enough days left when you approve, Orquiva refuses the approval.

Each person’s balance is the sum of entitled days, carry-over from the previous year and a manual adjustment. You edit it on their profile, HR tab, Vacation balance block. See Managing employees.

The Days per year cap works separately and is checked when someone requests: it adds up what is approved and pending for that type and refuses the request that goes over. Overlapping days count once. It’s also checked when a pending request is switched to this type, when time off is edited from the admin side and for time off that comes in through the public API, and even when several requests are sent at once none slips past the cap. If an edited time off’s new version doesn’t pass, the original stays as it was.

Holidays

OrganizationTime trackingHolidays

Under Public calendars you choose your company’s country. Its national holidays come from the public Nager.Date service and you see them in the table, year by year. There is a single calendar per company: there are no holidays by region or by worksite.

Local days go under Contract holidays:

This is how your team sees them: Public holidays and non-working days.

What happens next

New types show up in the picker when someone requests time off (how the employee sees them). Each request is decided by the direct manager, and whoever has the time-off permission decides for the whole company: see Approving your team’s time off.

Notified time off is approved as soon as it’s recorded, and the manager gets the notice. If it started without an end date, it stays open until someone sets one: the person themselves or whoever decides on them, from Approving your team’s time off.

If something goes wrong

Approving a vacation shows “Not enough vacation balance to approve this request.” What is already approved plus this request exceeds the year’s balance. To authorize an exception, raise the Manual adjustment on their profile and approve again.

Someone can’t request a leave: “This goes over the days per year allowed for this type.” What is approved plus what is pending for that type already reaches the cap. Raise the type’s Days per year or resolve the pending requests first.

I can’t find how to approve sick leave. You don’t need to: the type has Notified, not approved, so it’s approved as soon as it’s recorded.

A national holiday isn’t worked in your region, or a local one is missing. Use Contract holidays. Note that the balance only skips national holidays. A manual holiday inside a vacation is still deducted, and an excluded one is still not deducted.