Odoo Leaves Implementation
Time-off requests, balances, carry-forward.
Leave policies, balances, carry-forward, encashment, comp-off, and multi-level approvals, plus team calendar and conflict detection.
The module is hr_holidays and the interface calls it Time Off. It runs on two records. An allocation is the entitlement, a request is the absence taken against it, and the balance is the difference. The hard questions all sit on the first record: how it is created, on what schedule it grows, what survives the year end, and who owns the remainder when somebody resigns in March.
Duration is the second thing to grasp. Odoo measures a request against the employee's working schedule, so weekends, public holidays loaded onto that calendar and non-working afternoons drop out of the count. That is right for most of Europe and wrong wherever the labour law states entitlement in calendar days. The whole app is in Community. What Enterprise adds sits around it, in payroll, scheduling and the timeline view, not in the leave rules themselves.
The balance an employee sees is allocated days, minus days taken, minus requests still waiting for approval, so the figure moves when a request is submitted rather than when it is approved. Reporting is the app's own analysis by employee and by leave type, in pivot and graph form. A money value for the leave liability is not among them. That number gets assembled from a balances extract and a day rate, which makes it a payroll conversation rather than a Time Off one.
Who Odoo Leaves is for
- → Employers past fifty staff whose leave lives in a spreadsheet with a balance column nobody quite believes.
- → Groups operating in more than one country, where entitlement, the working week and the public holiday list differ per entity.
- → GCC employers where annual leave, leave salary, the air ticket and end of service all read from one service record.
- → Field and services businesses that schedule work against people, so an approved absence has to reach the planner before the week is committed.
- → It is not a rostering tool. Shift patterns belong in Planning, which is Enterprise only, and Time Off records absence against them.
- → It fits badly where entitlement is fixed per grade by a collective agreement with monetary day values. That is payroll modelling rather than leave configuration.
Key features
- ✓ Multi-policy leave types
- ✓ Carry-forward & encashment
- ✓ Comp-off requests
- ✓ Multi-level approvals
- ✓ Team calendar
- ✓ Balance history & forecasting
What Odoo Leaves actually does
Leave types carry the policy
Each type is one rule set. It decides whether an allocation is required at all, whether the unit is a day, a half day or hours, whether a supporting document can be attached, and whether the balance may fall below zero and by how much. It also sets approval: none, the employee's approver, a Time Off Officer, or both in turn. Types are scoped by company, and an empty company field makes the type visible in every company in the database. That is the setting to check first in a multi entity build, because a type written for one entity and left unscoped appears in the other entity's dropdown.
Allocations and accrual plans
An allocation is either a fixed grant or driven by an accrual plan, and the plan splits its settings across two records, which is where most configuration mistakes live. The plan holds whether time is gained at the start or the end of each period, the carry-over date, and whether a milestone change takes effect immediately or only once the current period closes. Each level under it holds the frequency, from daily up to yearly, an optional cap on total accrued time, and the length of service that promotes the employee to the next level. A level can also prorate the gain by time actually worked, which is how part year and irregular hours staff are handled. A daily scheduled job posts the accruals, so balances move without a month end run.
Carry-over, caps and expiry
Three settings on three different records decide what survives the year end, and missing one is the usual cause of a balance nobody can explain. The accrual level decides the action on unused days: carry all of them, carry up to a stated maximum, or reset to zero. The plan decides the date that happens on, which can be the start of the year, the anniversary of the allocation, or a day and month you pick, so anniversary based entitlement needs no custom build. Expiry is separate again and belongs to the allocation, which carries a validity period. Days that carried over onto an allocation with no end date never expire.
Public holidays, schedules and mandatory days
Public holidays are entered once and attached to the working schedules they apply to, which is how a UAE entity and a German entity in one database keep different calendars. Leave the schedule field empty and the holiday lands on every calendar in that company. Schedules also cover part time patterns and alternating weeks, and reduced Ramadan hours are a schedule change rather than a leave rule. Mandatory days work the other way and block requests over a period the business cannot afford to lose, which is what a stock count week or a year end close needs.
Approval routing and visibility
Approval follows the Time Off approver named on the employee record. That field starts from the reporting manager's user account and is then edited on its own, so in a database two years old the two lists have usually drifted apart. Access is graded on the user: an approver limited to their own team, an officer across the company, an administrator who configures types and plans. Naming notified officers on a leave type sets who receives the alert. It does not narrow who is allowed to open the request. Those are two different lists, and they get confused at most implementations.
Half days, hours and the duration that gets stored
A type set to half days makes the employee pick morning or afternoon. A type set to hours takes a start and an end time and measures the request in hours from the schedule. Whatever the unit, the duration is computed and written onto the request when it is saved. Change a working schedule afterwards, or add a public holiday, and requests already approved keep the figure they were saved with. That is correct behaviour at audit time and a surprise at every other time.
Self service and requests for extra allocation
A leave type can let employees ask for more allocation themselves, so a request for extra days follows the same approval route as an absence instead of arriving as an email to HR. Employees see their own balance per type, submit against it, and see approved team absence on a shared calendar. Managers get the same view scoped to their team. That screen is the reason opening balances have to be right on day one, because it is the first thing everybody opens.
How we configure Odoo Leaves
Write the entitlement matrix before you open Odoo
One row per leave type, with the unit, the accrual rule, the annual cap, the carry-over limit, the expiry, whether it is paid, whether it can be encashed and who approves it. Different rules mean different types, so annual leave that differs between staff and workers is two types, not one with an exception. That document is the configuration. Agreeing it takes longer than building it.
Working schedules come first
Duration is a function of the calendar, so the calendars have to be right before any leave data is loaded. Confirm the working week per country, hours per day, part time patterns and any alternating week arrangement, then assign a schedule to every employee. A default forty hour Monday to Friday calendar left sitting on a Gulf entity produces a wrong duration on every request from day one, quietly.
Opening balances, not history
At cutover, load one allocation per employee per leave type carrying the residual balance, dated at the switchover, with a validity end date on anything that expires. Reconcile the total against the closing report from the old system and have it signed off, because it is the number employees check first. Past requests do not need to come across. Keep them as an extract for the retention period.
Accrual start dates and the daily job
An accrual allocation with a start date in the past computes every intervening period the first time the job runs. That is useful for a mid year go live and alarming if nobody expected it. Rehearse it on a copy of the database with a joiner, a leaver, a part timer and someone crossing a service milestone, then compare the resulting balances line by line before it touches several hundred records.
Decide who approves and who can read
Walk the Time Off approver field on every employee record rather than trusting what it inherited from the org chart, because an empty field pushes those requests onto the officer group and a stale one sends them to somebody who has left. Then set the access level for each HR user deliberately. Officer level reads every request in the company, including reasons and attachments. Granting that group to five people during testing is how a sick note gets read by the wrong person, and it is far easier to widen access later than to explain it afterwards.
Run one month in parallel with named test cases
Before the spreadsheet is retired, run a month on both systems and compare. The cases that find real problems are a request spanning a public holiday, a request over a weekend, a half day, a part timer, a joiner mid month, a leaver with a negative balance and a carry-over crossing the leave year. Each has one right answer under the policy. Write those answers down first, then check what Odoo produced.
Where Odoo Leaves projects go wrong
Calendar days against working days
Several labour codes express annual leave in calendar days while Odoo counts working days from the schedule. Thirty calendar days is not thirty Odoo days, and a thirty day allocation on a five day week is closer to six weeks of absence. Either restate the entitlement in equivalent working days and record in writing why the number differs from the law, or scope a development item to compute calendar day duration on that type.
The sandwich rule
Odoo excludes an intervening weekend or public holiday from the middle of a request. Policy in Pakistan, India and parts of the Gulf does the opposite and counts days sitting inside a block of leave. There is no setting for it. It is a change to duration computation on the leave type, and discovering it during user acceptance turns a configuration project into a development one, usually two weeks before go live.
Public holidays added late, or attached to everything
Adding a holiday does not go back and shorten leave already approved across it, so a late confirmed Eid date leaves employees short of days they believe they hold. Load the whole year before go live and expect in-year adjustment where dates follow a moon sighting. Check the schedule and the company on each record while you are in there, because a holiday saved with no schedule applies to every calendar in that company, including the six day site.
Carry-forward that never dies
Carry-over moves a balance across the year boundary. It does not expire it. With no validity end date on the carried allocation, unused days accumulate for years and finance carries a liability nobody can tie back to a policy. Agree the expiry rule at design stage, and produce a balances report on the cut-off date so the accrual has a source somebody can audit rather than a number typed into a spreadsheet.
Sick leave and who can read it
Anyone at officer level opens any request in their scope, including the reason the employee typed and the certificate attached to it. If sick leave has to stay with two people, that means keeping the officer group down to those two, deciding whether the certificate belongs in Odoo at all rather than in an HR file, and pricing a record rule if the answer is that it does. This is the one access decision that is expensive to revisit, because by the time it is raised the attachments are already in the database.
A working schedule changed halfway through the year
Move somebody from five days to four and requests already approved keep their old durations while every new one is measured differently. An accrual level that prorates by worked time changes pace on the same date. Neither behaviour is wrong, but the balance stops reconciling by hand. Make schedule changes on a known date, record that date, and take a balances extract before and after so the difference has an explanation.
What it works with
- + Odoo Employees, which holds the working schedule, the department and the Time Off approver
- + Odoo Attendances, where a leave type can be set to draw its days from an employee's extra hours rather than a paid allocation
- + Odoo Payroll, Enterprise only, for unpaid absence, leave salary and the Gulf end of service rules
- + Odoo Timesheets, where a leave type can post an approved absence as a timesheet line against a chosen project and task
- + Odoo Planning and Field Service, both Enterprise, so approved absence removes the person before the week is published
- + Odoo Approvals, Enterprise, when a leave needs a sanction step beyond the two the leave type offers
- + Odoo Recruitment and onboarding, since a joiner needs a working schedule and a pro-rated allocation on the first day
Odoo Leaves by country
Saudi Arabia (KSA)
Annual leave runs at 21 days, rising to 30 once service passes five years, which maps onto an accrual milestone rather than two separate leave types. The wage for the leave is payable before it starts. Eid dates follow the Hijri calendar and are confirmed close to the day, so the holiday list cannot be locked a year ahead. Accrued leave settles into end of service, which lives in the Saudi payroll localization in Enterprise, not in Time Off.
United Arab Emirates
Federal Decree Law 33 of 2021 grants 30 calendar days of annual leave after a year of service, not 30 working days, so a flat 30 day allocation on a five day schedule overstates the entitlement by weeks. Between six and twelve months of service the rate is two days per month, which is a monthly accrual level with a milestone at one year rather than a second leave type. Sick leave is staged at 15 days on full pay, 30 at half pay and 45 unpaid, and that is three leave types if the pay treatment has to be visible without opening payroll.
Qatar
Annual leave is three weeks below five years of service and four weeks beyond it, with the untaken balance payable on termination. The employer sets the dates and may divide the leave into no more than two periods, which the system will not enforce, so it belongs in approval guidance rather than in a field. Working hours are reduced during Ramadan, so the schedule changes for that month and every hour based request measured inside it changes with it.
Pakistan
The Factories Act 1934 gives 14 consecutive days after twelve months of service, and consecutive means the holidays sitting inside the block count against it, the sandwich behaviour Odoo will not produce unaided. Casual and sick leave for shop and establishment staff come from provincial ordinances that differ between Punjab and Sindh, so a national employer configures entitlement per province rather than per company.
India
Entitlement is state law rather than one national number. The Factories Act 1948 gives one day of earned leave for every twenty days worked, with a ceiling on what carries forward, while each state Shops and Establishments Act fixes its own casual, sick and privilege leave. An employer across four states ends up with four sets of leave types, and the state has to be readable from the employee record for anyone to allocate correctly.
Turkey
Article 53 of Labour Law 4857 scales annual leave with service: 14 days from one to five years, 20 up to fifteen, 26 beyond that, with a floor of 20 days for workers under 18 or over 50. Entitlement moves on the employment anniversary rather than on 1 January, which is exactly what an accrual milestone plus a carry-over date tied to the allocation date are for.
United Kingdom
Statutory holiday is 5.6 weeks, capped at 28 days on a five day week, and an employer may count the eight bank holidays inside that figure rather than on top of it. Irregular hours and part year workers accrue at 12.07 per cent of the hours worked in each pay period, which belongs on an hours based leave type with the accrual prorated by worked time, not on a flat annual grant.
Germany
The Bundesurlaubsgesetz minimum is 24 working days on a six day week, so 20 on a five day week, and carry-over into the following year is lawful only in defined cases and normally only until 31 March. Case law puts the burden on the employer to warn employees about untaken leave before it lapses, so that reminder is a process obligation rather than an optional report. Public holidays differ by Bundesland, so each site needs its own schedule.
Odoo Leaves FAQs
Is Time Off available in Odoo Community?
Yes, and in full. Leave types, allocations, accrual plans with milestones and carry-over, public holidays, mandatory days, two step approval and the pivot and graph reporting are all Community. Enterprise adds the Gantt overview for a team timeline, the payroll rules that pay or deduct an absence, Planning and Field Service so an approved absence reaches the schedule, the Approvals app and Studio for extra fields on the request form. None of that changes how a balance is calculated. It changes what happens around it.
Does every employee need an Odoo user account to book their own leave?
Yes. Time Off is a backend app with no portal page, so an employee who submits and tracks their own requests needs an internal user rather than a portal contact. On Community that costs nothing beyond the server it runs on. On Enterprise or Odoo Online it is a per user subscription, and across several hundred staff the leave app on its own can set the licence count. Approvers and officers need accounts too, so the number is not only the people taking leave.
An employee says their balance is wrong. Where do we look?
Four places, in this order. The working schedule on the employee record, because a wrong calendar makes every duration wrong. The duration stored on the disputed request, which was calculated the moment it was saved and has not moved since. Pending requests, because the figure on screen already has them deducted before anyone approves. Then the allocations, for a validity end date that has quietly taken days out of reach. In practice it is the first or the third.
Does Odoo handle leave encashment?
Not in the Time Off app. There is no encashment action on a balance. The Gulf payroll localizations in Enterprise carry rules that pay a balance out, and everywhere else it is a payroll input taken from the residual balance at a cut-off date. What gets built, then, is a balances report at a stated date that somebody is willing to sign, rather than a button in the leave screen.
Can an employee go into a negative balance?
Only if the leave type allows it. The setting is per type, off by default, and it takes a limit on how far below zero the balance may go. If you turn it on, add a balance check to the offboarding steps, because a negative balance at exit becomes a deduction on the final settlement that somebody has to calculate and then defend to the employee.
We need three approval levels. Is that configurable?
Not as a setting. A leave type is approved by the employee's Time Off approver, by a Time Off Officer, or by both in turn, which gives two human steps. A third level is custom: either a development item on the request itself, or a sanction recorded in the Approvals app in Enterprise before the leave is raised. Both are ordinary work, and both should be priced rather than assumed.
Do public holidays have to be entered every year?
Yes, by hand. Odoo does not fetch a national holiday list and there is no built in country set to pick from. Each holiday is attached to the working schedules it applies to, so a group running a UAE entity, a German entity and a six day site maintains three sets and checks the schedule and the company on every line. Budget an hour per country per year and put it in the calendar of whoever owns the HR system, because a missing holiday goes unnoticed until somebody is marked absent on it.
What happens to leave when somebody resigns in the middle of the year?
Nothing automatic. A fixed grant made in January stays at its full value, so a March leaver shows an overstated balance until somebody reduces the allocation to the pro-rata figure. The working order is: adjust or close the allocation, take the balance extract, pass the residue to payroll for settlement or deduction, then archive the employee. Archive first and the records you needed drop out of the default views.
Can HR record leave for employees who never log in?
Yes. A Time Off Officer creates the request against any employee in their scope and approves it in the same pass, which is the normal pattern for site and factory populations without accounts. The trade off is the self service screen, since that is where an employee would otherwise check a balance. Take it away and every balance question comes back to HR by phone, so the report built for finance ends up being read out loud instead.