Time-off policies often look simple on paper.
An employee receives a certain number of days each year, uses them when needed, and perhaps carries some forward.
In reality, things quickly get complicated.
Employees in different locations may have different entitlements. New joiners need prorated allowances. Some companies grant extra days based on seniority, allow advance leave, limit carryover, or require unused days to expire.
When these rules live across spreadsheets, policy documents, and people’s memory, HR ends up applying them manually.
We think there is a better approach:
Define the policy once. Let the system run it.
One policy model, many use cases
A time-off policy should answer four questions:
Who is eligible? What are they entitled to? When do they receive it? What happens to the balance over time?
With these building blocks, companies can support annual leave, sick leave, parental leave, study leave, volunteer days, and their own policies.
Eligibility can depend on location, employment type, employee status, or length of service.
Instead of HR repeatedly deciding which rules apply, the system determines eligibility automatically.
Automate how leave is earned
Leave can be granted yearly or accrued monthly.
When someone joins partway through a month or year, their entitlement can be prorated automatically based on eligible days.
Seniority can work the same way.
If employees receive additional leave after two or five years of service, the system can detect those milestones and update their entitlement automatically.
No manual calculations. No anniversary spreadsheet.
Make carryover predictable
Unused leave creates another set of rules.
Should everything carry forward? Only five days? When should carried leave expire?
These decisions can be defined directly in the policy.
At the end of each cycle, the system determines what carries forward, what expires, and what is forfeited.
Policies can also support advance leave, allowing employees to use leave before it has been earned within limits defined by the company.
Policies change. History shouldn't.
Companies change their policies over time.
New rules can be scheduled with effective dates while existing policies continue running until the change takes effect.
When corrections need to apply retroactively, affected accruals can be recalculated while preserving approved leave and manual adjustments where appropriate.
And every balance change remains traceable - whether it came from an accrual, seniority bonus, carryover, expiration, adjustment, or leave request.
Turn policies into executable rules
The goal isn't to give HR more configuration.
It's to turn repetitive decisions into rules the system can execute.
Once configured, the platform can automatically handle eligibility, proration, accruals, seniority, carryover, expiration, advance leave, and policy changes.
HR still owns the policy. The platform handles the repetition.
Employees join. Contracts change. People gain seniority. Balances move into another year. Policies evolve.
The system should respond automatically.
That's how we think about time off at X-HR.
A time-off policy shouldn't just describe the rules. It should run them.
