Carry Over

Protect Staff Leave at Year-End

Key takeaways:

With a clear carry-over policy, you can protect eligible unused leave at year-end.
Leave Dates applies your rules automatically (limits, calculations and expiry dates).
Less admin, fewer mistakes, and a consistent approach for everyone.

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The two usual (painful) options

If you’re not using a staff holiday planner, year-end leave tends to end one of two ways:

Employees lose leave they’ve earned
Morale drops, people feel short-changed, and you risk ending up out of line with your own policy.
You fix it manually
You trawl through spreadsheets, recalculate balances, and roll days over by hand - right when you’re busiest.

Either way, it’s stressful, time-consuming, and easy to get wrong.

The better way: set carry-over rules once, then automate

There’s a third option: use Leave Dates and create a carry-over policy that automatically handles year-end for you.

You decide:

How many days can be carried over (eg. up to 5 days)
Whether carried-over leave expires (eg. must be used by 31 March)

Leave Dates then:

Calculates unused leave at year-end
Applies your carry-over limit
Adds the correct amount to the new leave year
Tracks expiry automatically (if you set one)

No last-minute admin rush. No missed days. No “why is my balance wrong?” conversations.

Scenario: Tony dodges a December admin disaster

Tony runs a busy garage with 15 staff. By mid-December, he notices that four employees have more than 3 days of unused leave. They’ve worked hard all year, and Tony wants to treat them fairly; without shutting the business down.

In previous years, Tony handled it in spreadsheets:

checking who had what left
recalculating allowances
manually adjusting balances
rolling days into the new year

One year, a miscalculation meant an apprentice lost leave, which was only spotted later.

That was the final straw.

This time, Tony sets a clear carry-over policy in Leave Dates. The system applies the rules automatically, and everyone starts the new leave year with the correct balance. No spreadsheet headaches.

How to enable carry over in Leave Dates (takes ~2 minutes)

Carry over is available in Starter, Essential and Plus plans.

To set it up:

Go to Settings > Allowances
Select the allowance type (eg. Annual Leave)
Open Carry Over policy (or add one)
Set the maximum number of days employees can carry over
Set an expiry date for carried-over leave (or set it to never expire)

Once it’s enabled, Leave Dates takes care of the calculations automatically.

Want the full walkthrough? Get step‑by‑step instructions for setting up your leave carry over policy.

The bottom line

A clear carry-over policy plus automation helps you:

Protect eligible unused leave at year-end
Save hours of manual admin
Keep records accurate, fair, and consistent across the team

It’s one more way Leave Dates makes leave management simpler for managers, admins and employees.

Frequently asked questions

Yes - if your company policy allows it, employees can carry leave over. Also, UK rules can allow (and in some situations require) carry over, for example, where leave couldn’t be taken due to certain types of absence. If you’re unsure, check your policy and get appropriate HR/legal advice.

That’s up to the employer’s policy (within applicable rules). A common approach is something like:

Maximum 5 days carried over
Must be used within 3 months (eg. by 31 March)

This is easy to set up in Leave Dates, and the system applies the rules automatically.

If your policy sets an expiry deadline, any carried-over leave will lapse after that date. With Leave Dates, balances update automatically based on the rules you set. No manual recalculation is needed.

Yes, you can manually override the system-calculated values. You can also lock the values to prevent Leave Dates from recalculating on the first day of the year.