Emergency leave allowance and leave cycles
Emergency leave allowance covers the leave people cannot plan: they were ill, something happened, and they are telling you afterwards rather than asking beforehand. Rather than refusing it or approving it informally, KAMI lets you allow a limited amount of unplanned leave inside a repeating window — and stop allowing it once the window's allowance is used.
Where: Settings › Calendar › Activities, on an off-work activity You need: the calendar settings right
When to use this, and when not to
| The situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Unplanned leave, taken and reported after the fact | Emergency leave allowance |
| Planned leave requested in advance | An ordinary leave type — see Leave types and policies |
| Correcting a record that should have been leave | Convert to leave — see Requesting and amending leave |
| Leave that must never be refused for balance reasons | An auto-approving leave type, not this |
The distinction that matters: an ordinary leave type asks do you have the balance? Emergency allowance asks have you used up your allowance of unplanned absences in this window? They answer different questions and most companies want both.
How the cycle works
The allowance resets on a cycle, and you choose how that cycle is measured:
- Lookback period — a rolling window. "Three days in any 90 days" counts backwards from today, so the allowance replenishes gradually as old instances age out.
- Calendar month — a fixed window. The allowance resets on the first of the month, whatever happened before.
These behave very differently in practice. A rolling lookback prevents the pattern of someone taking their full allowance on the last day of one month and the first day of the next; a calendar month is easier for employees to understand and predict. Choose the lookback where absence patterns are a real concern, the calendar month where clarity matters more.
How to configure it
- Open the off-work activity the allowance applies to in Settings › Calendar › Activities.
- Enable the emergency leave allowance.
- Set the reset type — lookback period or calendar month.
- Set the allowance — how much unplanned leave is permitted inside that window.
What Happens Next
- Employees can record leave of this type after the fact, up to the allowance, without it being refused for lack of notice.
- Once the allowance in the current window is used, further instances are outside the allowance and handled as ordinary leave — meaning balance and approval rules apply normally.
- Instances appear on the team calendar and the timesheet like any other leave, and are paid according to the activity.
- With a lookback period, the allowance recovers as old instances pass out of the window — no action needed.
Tips
- Set the allowance to match your actual tolerance, not to zero. An allowance of zero is the same as not having the feature, and pushes unplanned absence into informal arrangements that no report can see.
- Tell people the number. An allowance nobody knows about cannot influence behaviour; it just produces surprise refusals.
- Review who is repeatedly at their allowance. That is the signal this feature exists to produce — and it is a wellbeing or workload conversation far more often than a disciplinary one.
- Prefer the lookback period if you are using this to manage a pattern, because a calendar month allowance can be doubled at the month boundary.
Troubleshooting / FAQ
Q: An employee was refused emergency leave despite being under the allowance. Check the reset type. With a lookback period, instances from up to the full window still count — even ones that feel like "last month".
Q: The allowance seems to reset at odd times. Lookback windows reset per instance as each ages out, not all at once. Calendar-month cycles reset on the first.
Q: Someone used far more than the allowance. The allowance limits what is treated as emergency leave. Beyond it, the leave is still recordable as an ordinary type if the balance and approvals allow.