Tanda has two ways of preventing leave balances from becoming negative:
Option 1:
Preventing leave requests from being submitted that would result in more leave being taken than the employee has available.
Note that this setting does not retroactively correct existing negative balances; any negative balances must be manually adjusted.
Option 2:
Using a 'fallback' leave type when an employee requests more leave than they have available.
Both options are configured per leave type in Tanda.
Option 1: Prevent leave requests from being submitted
This prevents employees from submitting leave requests if their request would put them into a negative balance of this leave type.
Using Tanda Payroll
Go to Payroll > Settings > Leave Types and click the leave type you want to configure.
Under Advanced Settings, tick Prevent leave balances from falling below 0.
Not using Tanda Payroll
Go to Time & Attendance > Compliance > Leave Types and click the leave type you want to configure.
Under 4. Advanced Settings, tick both Disallow negative leave balances for this leave type and Prevent leave requests being submitted if they would exceed their existing balance.
When an employee requests more leave than their current balance, the leave request cannot be submitted. A warning will display showing that the balance is insufficient:
Managers and admins will override this setting and can still submit requests that would put the employee or themselves into a negative balance.
Option 2: Allow leave to fall back on another leave type
How fallback leave works
Fallback leave allows a leave request to be submitted that exceeds an employee's current balance. When approved, the request is automatically split across multiple leave types, ensuring the employee's requested leave type balance does not go below zero.
The originally requested leave type is used first, up to the employee's remaining balance. Any hours beyond that are allocated to the configured fallback leave type.
Tanda also looks at all upcoming approved leave for that leave type in date order, taking into account any leave that will accrue before each request starts. Each split/request is recalculated whenever their balance changes (e.g., a new request, editing a request, deleting a request), so the result always reflects the employee's current balance.
The original request and its fallback request are treated as a single request. Approving, rejecting, editing, or deleting the original applies to the fallback request too. The fallback request cannot be actioned independently.
Splitting a Request
For example, if Unpaid Leave is set as the fallback for Annual Leave, and an employee has 1.5 hours of Annual Leave but requests 7.6 hours, approving the request will allocate 1.5 hours to Annual Leave and the remaining 6.1 hours to Unpaid Leave.
If the employee has no balance remaining, the original request shows 0 hours and the fallback request covers the full amount.
Leave is also taken from the balance in date order, so an earlier request can push a later one into fallback.
For example: An employee currently has 4 available hours of annual leave. They also have an approved request for 8 hours of annual leave in a few days, on Friday. This means the employee currently has a total of 12 hours (8 hours approved but untaken + 4 hours unused) of Annual Leave.
They then add another request to use 8 hours of annual leave for the day before (Thursday).
When the Thursday request is approved, it uses 8 hours of Annual Leave (as it occurs earlier and takes priority over the Friday request), and automatically changes the already-approved Friday request into 4 hours of Annual Leave and 4 hours of Unpaid Leave.
This also works in reverse. If an earlier request is cancelled, rejected, shortened, or deleted, the balance it was using is freed up, and any later requests that were using fallback leave are automatically moved back to the original leave type. A request that no longer needs fallback is merged back to a single leave type.
Turning on fallback leave
Fallback leave is configured per leave type.
Using Tanda Payroll
Go to Payroll > Settings > Leave Types and click the leave type you want to configure.
Under Advanced Settings, tick Prevent leave balances from falling below 0.
Scroll down to Leave Rules and choose a leave type in the Fallback Leave field for each applicable leave rule.
Fallback settings should not loop back on themselves (for example, Annual Leave falling back to Unpaid Leave, where Unpaid Leave then falls back to Annual Leave). If this happens, leave requests cannot be created.
You can have a chain, but not a loop. For example, Sick Leave falling back into Annual Leave, and Annual Leave falling back into Unpaid Leave would be accepted. In this case, the request would be split into 3 different leave types.
Not Using Tanda Payroll
Go to Time & Attendance > Compliance > Leave Types and click the leave type you want to configure.
Under 4. Advanced Settings, tick Disallow negative leave balances for this leave type.
Then, tick Allow leave to fall back on another leave type if a request would exceed its balance at the time it's taken and choose a fallback leave type.
Ensure your fallback leave configuration does not create a 'fallback loop', which is where a fallback leave chain loops back on to itself.
Troubleshooting/FAQs
Fallback leave is not triggering in a leave request
Fallback leave is not triggering in a leave request
If the leave request is not triggering fallback leave when you think it should, first check that all of the dot points below are true:
The Prevent negative leave balances/Prevent leave balances from falling below 0 setting is ticked.
A fallback leave type is set in the leave type settings
An accrual rate is set/a projected balance is calculated for the leave type. If the balance projection is unknown, the request is left alone rather than splitting against a made-up zero.
The leave request will actually exceed the employee's balance for the originally requested leave type. Note that a leave request in the future will only look at the predicted amount of accrued leave/taken leave between the day the request is being made/approved, and the start date of the request.
The accrual rate in the leave type is a number less than 1 (1 hour accrued for 1 hour worked). A rate of 1 or higher will never result in the balance being reduced to 0, and therefore never trigger fallback leave.
The employee is eligible for the fallback leave type.
The request is approved. Fallback leave will only trigger once the leave request is approved.
A request was submitted that put an employee into a negative balance, even though I've prevented negative leave balances
A request was submitted that put an employee into a negative balance, even though I've prevented negative leave balances
If you are not using Tanda Payroll, check that both the "Disallow negative leave balances for this leave type" and "Prevent leave requests being submitted if they would exceed their existing balance" settings are ticked.
Managers and admins will override and are not affected by the Disallow negative leave balances settings.