What happens to unused leave days at the end of a leave year?

When a leave year closes, whatever is left of it moves into the next one. Worktivity writes that as a normal entry on Leave rights, so the days are visible and countable rather than hidden in a formula. Three settings decide how much moves and how long it survives.

The three settings

They live in Workspace settings, Tracking tab, underneath the Leave management switch.

• Carry unused days over: on by default. Turn it off and a leave year simply ends. Nothing moves, and the new year starts on whatever you grant for it.
• Carry-over cap (days): the most that may move per person, per leave type. 0 means no cap, not "nothing carries over". Set it to 5 and somebody with 12 days left starts the new year with 5.
• Carried days expire after (months): counted from the start of the new leave year. 0 means they never expire. Set it to 3 and days carried into a year beginning 1 January have to be used by 1 April.

The two zeros mean opposite-sounding things on purpose: 0 in the cap field means unlimited, 0 in the expiry field means never. Both defaults exist so that switching leave years on does not quietly take days away from anybody.

When it happens

A background job runs once a night, in the early hours. It is not tied to the stroke of midnight, so on the first morning of a new leave year the carried days may not be there yet. They will be by the next day.

The job also re-checks the last two leave years every night. Owners can enter leave with dates in the past, and that changes what should have been carried; the correction lands on the existing entry instead of adding a second one, so the list never shows the same carry-over twice.

What you see on Leave rights

• A row tagged Carried over under the new year, holding the days that moved.
• When carried days expire, a row tagged Expired with a negative number of days. Nothing is deleted: the balance falls because a line was added, and that line is the answer to "why did my balance drop".
• Both rows are written by Worktivity, so Edit and Delete are greyed out on them. Editing one would be overwritten, and deleting one would come back the next night. To change what somebody has, grant or remove a normal entitlement instead.

How much actually moves

What moves is the closing year's own balance: the days granted for that year, minus every request in that year that was not rejected. It is worked out per person and per leave type, so vacation and sick days carry separately.

• Entitlements marked All years are left out. They already count in every year, and carrying them as well would give the same days twice.
• A negative balance carries over too. It is not touched by the cap and it does not expire, otherwise every new leave year would quietly write off the days somebody owes.
• Carried days are treated as used first. Somebody who carried 5 days and has taken 3 this year loses 2 when the carry-over expires, not 5.

Turning carry-over off

Switching it off stops new carry-over entries from being written. Entries that already exist stay where they are and keep counting; they were granted days like any other. Delete them one by one from Leave rights if you also want the days gone, and expect that person's balance to drop by exactly that amount.

How the leave year is decided comes first: without a leave year there is nothing to carry over from.