--- title: Holiday and leave canonical_url: https://hrhive.co.uk/product/leave/ content_type: product summary: Employees request holiday and managers approve or decline it. HRHive counts working days, keeps each person's balance for the holiday year, adds bank holidays and company closures, carries unused days forward, and builds up holiday for irregular hours at 12.07% of the hours worked. audiences: - employer - adviser - manager - employee topic: leave jurisdiction: uk status: published last_updated: 2026-10-05 --- # Holiday requests, approvals and balances, without the spreadsheet > Employees request holiday and managers approve or decline it. HRHive counts working days, keeps each person's balance for the holiday year, adds bank holidays and company closures, carries unused days forward, and builds up holiday for irregular hours at 12.07% of the hours worked. ## What problem does this solve? Holiday is tracked in a shared calendar, a spreadsheet and an inbox. Someone counts working days by hand, remembers which bank holidays fall inside the leave, and chases the balance at the end of the year. Part-year starters, part-time patterns and people on irregular hours make the sums harder, and a mistake becomes a difficult conversation. ## What HRHive does - Lets employees request holiday and managers approve or decline it. HR can decide too. The request shows the number of working days, excluding weekends and bank holidays. - Works out each person's balance for the holiday year: entitlement (pro rata in the year someone starts or leaves), carried forward, adjustments, bank holidays, taken, booked and awaiting approval. - Counts working days from each person's working pattern: the days they work, including half days. - Adds bank holidays for England and Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland from the official GOV.UK list, which updates automatically. - Handles company closure days, the days the whole business is closed. You choose whether each one comes out of everyone's holiday allowance. - Carries unused days forward at the start of the holiday year, up to the maximum you set. - Lets HR adjust a balance, for example for bought or sold days or a correction. Every adjustment is recorded with its reason. - Builds up holiday for people on irregular hours at 12.07% of the hours they work. HR records the hours for each pay period. - Shows who is away on a calendar, and lists approved leave in a report. - Has nine built-in leave types: annual leave, sickness, unpaid leave, maternity, paternity, shared parental leave, compassionate leave, study leave and other. For each one you choose whether it needs approval and whether it uses the holiday allowance. > **What HRHive does not do with leave** > > HRHive is not a rota. The calendar shows who is away, not who is working which shift. For most people it uses the entitlement you set rather than working out their statutory entitlement, and it does not calculate holiday pay, or statutory pay for family leave. Leave types such as maternity and paternity are recorded as absence. ## How it works 1. **Set it up once.** Choose when the holiday year starts, which nation's bank holidays apply, the default entitlement, the maximum days that can be carried forward and whether bank holidays count against the allowance. Then set each person's working days and entitlement on their employment details. 2. **An employee asks.** From the portal they choose the type, the first and last day, any half days and a note. HRHive shows the working days and turns down a request that overlaps leave already booked or asks for more than they have left. 3. **The manager decides.** They are emailed straight away and approve or decline, with an optional reason that goes to the employee. If the person has no manager recorded, or their manager has no HRHive login, HR, admins and owners are told instead. Nobody can approve their own leave. 4. **The employee is told.** The decision is emailed to them, and the balance updates. 5. **HR can record leave for someone.** Leave recorded by HR or by a manager for their team is approved at once, which suits holiday agreed by phone. 6. **The year rolls over.** Unused days are carried forward, up to your limit, and the new year starts with the balance. ## What you see HR and managers see a Holidays page with a Calendar, Upcoming leave, Awaiting approval, Balances and, for HR, Bank holidays and closures. The calendar shows each person across the month, with pending leave marked differently from approved leave. Employees see their own balance, their requests and a Request holiday button in the portal, on Home and on the Holidays page. **Holidays** — Awaiting approval, 2 requests - Priya Nair, Annual Leave, 12 October to 16 October 2026 — Awaiting approval (5 days) - Mei Ling Chen, Annual Leave, 26 October 2026 — Awaiting approval (1 day) Approved leave appears on the calendar, and balances update as soon as it is approved. ## The record it creates Every request, decision, cancellation and adjustment is recorded on the person's timeline, with who did it and when. The person's Holidays tab keeps the balance and every request for the year. The Holiday balances report lists entitlement, carried forward, adjustments, bank holidays, taken, booked, pending and remaining for everyone, and the Holiday calendar report lists approved leave in a date range. Both export to CSV, Excel and PDF, and the holiday record is a section of the personnel file. HRHive counts days, not money. _Example output (demo data): an Employee Record: personal details, employment terms, documents held, right to work status and history in one printable file._ ## Who can do what Managers decide for their own team, and nobody decides their own leave. HR and administrators can decide for everyone. | Role | What they can do | | --- | --- | | Owner, admin and HR | Approve or decline anyone's leave, record leave for anyone, adjust balances, record the hours of people on irregular hours, and set leave types, closure days and the holiday year. | | Manager | See the leave of the people who report to them, approve or decline their requests and record leave for them. They cannot approve their own leave or adjust balances. | | Payroll / Finance | Read everyone's leave and balances. They cannot approve or change anything. | | Compliance | Has no access to leave. | | Employee | Request holiday, cancel a pending request or approved leave that has not started, and see their own balance and requests. | | Auditor (read only) | Read leave and balances without changing anything. | | Adviser invited into the organisation | Works with whichever role you give them. An HR consultant given the HR role can manage leave as HR does. | ## What happens next Home flags leave requests that are waiting for approval, and shows who is away today. When someone leaves, leave booked wholly after their last day is cancelled, and leave that runs past it is flagged for HR to adjust. Sickness is recorded as leave too: see [Sickness and absence](https://hrhive.co.uk/product/sickness-absence/). Employees do all of this from the [employee portal](https://hrhive.co.uk/product/employee-self-service/). ## Frequently asked questions ### Can I use HRHive for part-time staff and people on zero-hours contracts? Yes. For part-time work, set the days each person works, including half days, and their entitlement in days, and HRHive counts working days from that. For zero-hours, casual or part-year work, turn on irregular hours. Holiday then builds up at 12.07% of the hours they work instead of a yearly entitlement, and HR records their hours for each pay period. ### Does it work out how much holiday someone is entitled to? It uses the entitlement you set for each person, in days, and pro-rates it in the year someone starts or leaves. For people on irregular hours it builds up holiday at 12.07% of the hours worked. To work out an entitlement from scratch, use the :link[holiday entitlement calculator]{to="tool:holiday-entitlement-calculator"}. ### What happens to unused holiday at the end of the year? At the start of the next holiday year HRHive carries unused days forward automatically, up to the maximum you have set in Settings. HR can adjust any balance, and every adjustment is recorded with its reason. ## About this page - Last updated: 5 October 2026 ## Related **In HRHive** - [Employee self-service](https://hrhive.co.uk/product/employee-self-service/) - [Sickness and absence records](https://hrhive.co.uk/product/sickness-absence/) - [Employee records and personnel files](https://hrhive.co.uk/product/employee-records/) - [Reports and exports](https://hrhive.co.uk/product/reporting/) - [Offboarding, a tidy finish for every leaver](https://hrhive.co.uk/product/offboarding/) Canonical URL: https://hrhive.co.uk/product/leave/ Start with HRHive: https://app.hrhive.co.uk/sign-in?next=%2Fnew%3Fhh_funnel%3Dleave_absence%26hh_route%3Demployer%26hh_goal%3Dfirst_leave_recorded%26hh_page%3Dproduct%252Fleave