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Managing Leave Balances

Load, sync or calculate leave balances.

Leave balances are displayed to employees when applying for leave, and to managers when approving leave requests. Leave balances can also be viewed on the employee profile and in the mobile app.

How it Works

Tanda Payroll

If you use Tanda Payroll, you have a singular leave balance. The balance at the end of the last pay period is your balance for the entire current period. The balance will only automatically increase/decrease once payroll is run for that period. The only exception is when manual changes are made to the balance, in which case the balance in the app and on your employee profile will be updated immediately.

Other Payroll Software

If you use other payroll systems such as Xero or MYOB, your leave balances will typically sync to Tanda twice a day. Changes to leave balances made in Tanda will not be reflected in your payroll system.

Leave balances in your payroll software

For Tanda Payroll, an outline of how leave balances work can be found below under Leave in Tanda Payroll.

For other payroll systems, please refer to the below.

Some payroll software will sync leave balances automatically via the integration, including:

  • Xero (Australia)

  • MYOB AccountRight Live

  • MYOB Essentials

  • Micropay (Web API enabled)

For payroll systems that do not sync automatically, export your leave balances to a .CSV file and import this to Tanda.

The connection between your payroll system and the corresponding Tanda leave type is the 'Export Name' in the Leave Type settings in Tanda:

Find this field under Leave > Leave Tools > Leave Types > Edit.

The Export Name must match exactly with the name in your payroll software for it to sync.

Balances will sync for the employees to whom the leave type applies in Tanda. To confirm which staff a leave type applies to in Tanda, navigate to Time & Attendance > Compliance > Manage Leave Types and click the link in the Applies to column as shown below:


Importing & Editing leave balances

CSV Import

You should only need to import and edit leave balances using this method if your payroll system doesn't sync balances to Tanda automatically, or if a leave balance needs to be cleared from the WFM side.

To bulk import or update leave balances, follow the below steps:

  1. Navigate to Time & Attendance > Leave > Leave Tools > Manage Leave Balances

  2. Download the CSV template from this page and fill out the balances for each of your staff. For any leave types that you don't hold balances for or want to remove, leave these blank.

  3. Upload the updated CSV to the same page.

These balances will be visible on the employee profile under the Leave & Unavailability tab, and the employee will be able to check their balances in the mobile app under the Leave tab.

Profile

To edit a single employee’s leave balances, you can also do so directly on their profile. Navigate to their profile > Leave & Unavailability > Leave Balances and select Edit on the balance you want to update. Note that this will only appear if you are not using Tanda Payroll.

This will edit the Payroll and Available Balance until it is next synced wiht your payroll system.

Viewing Employee Leave Balances

To view an employee’s leave balances, navigate to their profile and select Leave & Unavailability > Leave Balances.


Leave in Tanda Payroll

Leave in Tanda Payroll works similarly to other payroll integrations, but uses just a single leave item.

You can view the Payroll Balance for an employee under the Payroll > Payroll Details tab in their profile:

This balance is also the balance shown in the Leave Balances tab, and in the mobile app.

To edit a balance here, click on the name of the leave type and adjust the Opening Balance.

To bulk upload the Payroll Opening Balances for leave, you can do so under Payroll > Payroll Settings > Import/Export.

From there, download the Leave Balances CSV and make the necessary changes in the Opening Balance column.

Once you’ve saved those changes, scroll down this page and reupload the file.

Note that you should not use the ‘Opening Balances: Leave’ file for updating balances that employees can use. This is only used when transitioning between payroll systems. Ensure you are using the 'Leave Balances' file.


Projected Leave Balances

To see projected balances when approving and applying for leave, you'll need to ensure that an Accrual Rate is set in the leave type, even if you accrue leave in your external payroll system. These projected balances help to see how much leave would be available in the future.

  • To add an accrual rate, navigate to Time & Attendance > Compliance > Manage Leave Types and select a leave type to edit

  • Scroll down to the accrual rate field, and enter your rate of accrual per hour

To learn more about how projected balances work, see Projected Leave Balances for future leave.


FAQs and Troubleshooting

How can I hide the leave balance for a leave type?

To turn off leave balance visibility for a leave type, navigate to Time & Attendance > Compliance > Manage Leave Types and click to edit the leave type.

Find and tick the setting 'Hide employee leave balances for this leave type'.

With Tanda Payroll, this is under section 3. Advanced Settings:

With only Workforce Management, this is under section 4. Advanced Settings:

Ticking this will remove it from the Leave tab in the mobile app, and will prevent the value from showing when the employee creates a leave request. Managers and Admins are still able to see the employee’s balance.

How can I troubleshoot an incorrect balance?

Changes made to leave balances are tracked using the Leave Balance Audit Trail. This produces an aggregated list of all changes to a leave balance for each employee and leave type. This will only track the Workforce Management balances (the Available Balance).

To download this, navigate to Time & Attendance > Leave > Leave Tools > Manage Leave Balances > Leave Balance Audit Trail.

Check that you’re selecting the correct default location and date range for the data you’re after.

The exported CSV can be filtered externally to help narrow down what you’re looking for. This report will show the time, date, before and after balances and the reason for each update to a balance.

The updates are generally from leave accruals, leave deductions related to leave requests, syncing with payroll software, and from CSV imports. If the Reason column is ‘unknown’, this typically points toward a sync with the payroll software, or from a CSV import.


If you’re using Tanda Payroll, you can also run the Employee Leave Report to find what the Payroll Leave Balance was at a certain point in time by adjusting the Pay Period date range and checking the Finishing Balance column.

Error: “ Something went wrong. Please try again later”

If you receive this error when importing a file, check the following:

Troubleshooting

Create another file containing just the header and the first row of user data and attempt to import it:

  • if it errors then it's likely an error with the headers.

  • if this uploads successfully then the error lies in the rest of the user data. It's difficult to pinpoint an error here, so it's recommended to download/export the same report and update it directly.

File format

Ensure the following:

  • it contains all the correct headers (download/export the same report to see what's expected).

  • there are no empty columns

  • that formatting has been removed (sometimes other software can add/remove unexpected values)

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