Leave and absence

Requesting, approving and tracking absence — balances, day portions, and manager scoping.

Absence covers everything that takes someone away from work, whether or not it is paid and whether or not it needs approval.

Absence types

Type	Meaning
HOLIDAY	Vacation (Ferien), drawn from the entitlement balance.
ABSENT	Other absence — unpaid leave, military service, compassionate leave.
SICK	Illness. See Sick leave.
CHILD_SICK	Caring for a sick child — a distinct statutory entitlement.
ACCIDENT	Accident, work-related or not. Separate from illness because the payout routes through a different Lohnart.

The distinction between SICK and ACCIDENT is not cosmetic: they hit different insurance and different payroll items, so recording an accident as illness produces a wrong declaration.

Day portions

An absence is not always a whole day:

Portion	Duration
FULL	Derived from the employee’s work schedule for that day.
HALF	Half of that.
CUSTOM	An explicit number of hours supplied by the requester.

FULL and HALF deliberately derive their hours from the schedule rather than assuming 8.4 — a 60% employee’s full day is not a full-timer’s full day, and getting this wrong quietly corrupts every balance.

Requesting and approving

1. Request

   The employee submits from the portal, the iOS app, or the dashboard. They see their current balance while requesting, so there are no surprises.

2. Approval

   The request goes to the line manager, resolved through the org graph. HR can approve for anyone.

3. Outcome

   Approved, rejected, or — for an already-approved absence — cancelled. Every transition is audited and notifies the requester.

Permissions and scoping

Permission	Who	Effect
staff-absence:view	EMPLOYEE, MANAGER, HR_STAFF+	See absences within your scope.
staff-absence:view-all	HR_STAFF+	See everyone’s.
staff-absence:create	EMPLOYEE, MANAGER, HR_STAFF+	Create a request. Without :manage you may only create for yourself.
staff-absence:manage	HR_STAFF+	Create and edit for anyone.
staff-absence:approve	MANAGER, HR_STAFF+	Drive the status transitions.

staff-absence:create exists as its own permission rather than reusing :view. A read permission authorising a write is how role drift turns into a security bug — widening :view later would have silently granted the ability to create.

Balances

Vacation entitlement comes from the employment period — the Swiss statutory minimum is four weeks, five for employees under 20 (OR Art. 329a), and your contracts may grant more. The balance is computed as:

entitlement (pro-rated by Pensum and by period)
  + carry-over from the previous year
  − approved and taken
  − approved and future
  = remaining

Pro-rating follows the employment periods, so a mid-year Pensum change produces the right entitlement without a manual calculation.

The team view

Managers get a calendar of their team’s absences — who is away when, and where requests would collide. This is what makes approval a decision rather than a guess.

Absence and payroll

Absences feed the monthly run. Unpaid absence reduces the salary base; sick leave and accident route through their own Lohnarten and the salary-continuation entitlement; untaken vacation is settled at the end of employment. See The monthly run.