Leave Management: Annual, excused and unpaid leave in one place, from entitlement to approval

Who is it for, and what problem does it solve?

Leave Management is for HR and payroll teams that keep annual leave balances in Excel and recalculate entitlements by hand on each employee's hiring anniversary. With this method, the risk of error rises because entitlement changes with seniority and age, and anniversaries fall on different dates. Other common problems come with it:

• Leave requests are scattered across email, instant messages and paper forms, and it is unclear which one was approved.
• It is not visible in advance how many people from the same team will be on leave at the same time.
• Approved leave is carried into the attendance ledger by hand at month end.
• Employees have to ask HR to find out how many leave days they have left.

The module ties entitlement to rules, routes each request through an approval flow and passes the result to the other modules in the Time & Attendance category.

What does Leave Management do?

The module brings together, in one record, the whole process from the moment a leave right arises to its use and its reflection in the attendance ledger. The functions available today are:

• Entitlement calculation: a calculation framework under Labour Law No. 4857 based on the seniority start date (the system does not combine periods worked at the same employer's workplaces; HR enters the combined start date by hand), age, underground work and absence days that do not count towards service. Extra days granted by contract are defined as a company rule by service year and are not applied retroactively.
• Leave types: annual paid leave, travel leave, marriage, adoption, death of a parent, spouse, sibling or child, the spouse giving birth, treatment of a child with a disability or chronic illness, and unpaid leave. The types and their legal maximums are defined in Sora İK. Sick leave and maternity leave are coming soon as leave types; today, sick leave is a day mark that HR enters in the Attendance Ledger (Puantaj). Defining company-specific leave types is also coming soon.
• Balance: remaining days, the next entitlement date and number of days; an opening balance at migration and individual adjustment entries.
• Request and preview: employees send requests from the self-service screen, and HR can also open a request on someone else's behalf. As dates are selected, the counted days, the uncounted days and why, the projected balance after the request and warnings (insufficient balance, leave not yet earned, a part shorter than 10 days, travel leave not adjacent to annual leave) are shown.
• Approval: if no workflow is defined, the direct manager decides; higher-level managers and HR can also decide (for example, when the manager is on leave). If a workflow is defined, only the approver of the current step and HR decide; a higher-level manager who is not in the step cannot. Rejection is done with an optional note. A multi-step approval sequence and delegation are set up with the Workflow & Approval Designer.
• Email notifications: new requests are notified to the manager or to the next approver in the workflow; approval, rejection and cancellation of approved leave by someone else are notified to the employee by bilingual email.
• Calendar: a monthly leave calendar with approved and pending leave, public and company holidays, and a department filter. Employees see only their own leave and managers their reporting team; opening the team calendar to employees is coming soon.
• Day calculation: weekly rest days (Sunday by default; the company can change this), national and public holidays, religious holidays and company holidays are not counted as leave days.
• Link to the attendance ledger: approved leave appears as a day code in the Attendance Ledger (Puantaj). Automatic inclusion of unpaid leave and sick leave days as missing days in the Payroll (Türkiye) calculation is coming soon.
• Reports: a balance table with search and a department filter, the next 30 days' entitlements on the dashboard and, in Reporting & People Analytics, a report of days used in the year by leave type (CSV). A usage report by date range and by person is coming soon.

How does it work?

Once the leave process is set up, every request follows the same path:

1. Set up the calendar and rules. Define the weekly rest days, the company's own holidays and any contractual extra-day rules.
2. Import opening balances. Enter each employee's carried-over leave days, or upload them in bulk with a CSV or xlsx template.
3. The employee requests leave. The system calculates the counted days and shows the balance after the request and any warnings; an email goes to the next approver.
4. The approver decides. If no workflow is defined, the direct manager, a higher-level manager or HR approves or rejects the request; if there is a workflow, the steps proceed in order, and at each step that step's approver or HR decides; the employee learns the outcome by email.
5. Records are updated. Approved annual leave is deducted from the balance; the leave is posted to the calendar and the attendance ledger.

Sora İK plans are priced annually by the number of active employees; details are on the Pricing page.

Regulatory note

The durations of annual paid leave and excused leave, the conditions for entitlement and how leave is used are set by legislation. Sora İK offers a calculation framework based on these rules; check the current text against the official source:

• Annual paid leave, excused leave and days not counted as leave: Labour Law No. 4857.
• How annual leave is used and leave records: Regulation on Annual Paid Leave.
• National and public holidays: Law No. 2429 on National Holidays and Public Holidays.

More favourable rights granted by an employment contract or a collective agreement are entered in the module as a contractual extra-day rule or an individual adjustment entry. This section is an informational list of sources and does not replace a legal opinion; for questions specific to your workplace, consult a labour law specialist.

Why are annual leave balances so often wrong?

Annual leave balances are most often wrong because the entitlement date, carried-over days and holiday calculation are worked out by different people using different methods. Common causes are:

• Adding the entitlement at the start of the calendar year instead of on the employee's hiring anniversary.
• Missing a change in entitlement tier due to seniority or age.
• Counting weekly rest days and public holidays that fall within the leave period as leave days.
• Not posting retroactive corrections and cancellations to the balance.

The module calculates entitlement according to each employee's own date; the employee's entitlement schedule shows the service year, date, days and the rule applied, line by line. Opening balance, usage and adjustment entries are stored with their date, the person who entered them and a note; a usage entry arising from an approved request is tied to that request, cannot be deleted by hand and is removed when the request is cancelled. Showing the cancellation as a separate reversing entry is coming soon. The Labour Law requires the employer to keep a leave record document showing annual paid leave; this record brings together, in one place, the entitlement and usage information on which that document is based.

The grounds for records such as sick days and leave for treating a child with a disability or chronic illness are health information, which is a special category of personal data under KVKK (Türkiye's Personal Data Protection Law No. 6698). The request form reminds users not to write health information in the note field; leave for a child's treatment appears in the notification email only as “Excused leave”. Details on how data is hosted and protected are on the Security and data protection page.