Leave and holidays

Leave in MusterHR runs on a balance per leave type for the April–March financial year, plus a company holiday calendar that decides which days are working days at all. This chapter covers the leave types the product ships with, applying for leave and how the days are counted, comp-off for days you worked on a holiday or weekly off, optional (restricted) holidays, cancelling a request, the approval queue for managers and HR, and how HR maintains the holiday calendar. Everything is in Indian Standard Time (IST).

---

Where everything lives

Your own leave lives under My space whatever else your role is. Sanjay Iyer in Finance applies for leave on exactly the same page as Priya Sharma in Engineering; the difference is that Finance has no Leave approvals entry in the sidebar. See Roles and permissions.

Worth knowing. If your sign-in has not been linked to an employee record, My leave shows "No employee record linked" and there is nothing to apply against — a common situation for an administrator account created before the person had a record. Ask HR to link the two on the employee record (Employee records and profiles).

---

The leave types MusterHR ships with

A new workspace is created with seven leave types. Their annual quotas are per financial year, per employee.

Leave Without Pay and Work From Home show as No quota on the page, with the line "apply any time · no balance to draw on". That is not a fault or an empty balance — those types deduct nothing, so there is nothing to run out of. They still go through approval.

Worth knowing. These types and their quotas are set when the workspace is created and there is no screen in MusterHR for editing them, renaming them, adding a type or changing a quota. What you see on My leave is what your company has. Earned Leave is configured as carry-forward eligible (up to 30 days), but nothing in the interface performs a carry-forward at the year end.

---

Balances and the financial year

The tiles at the top of My space → Leave show one card per leave type for the current financial year. A typical card reads:

Casual Leave 12 of 12 left used 0 · pending 0

• left is what you can still apply for: the annual quota, minus days already approved (used), minus days sitting in pending requests.
• Days move to pending the moment you apply, not when the request is decided. That is deliberate — it stops you applying for the same days twice over.
• On approval, pending becomes used. On rejection or cancellation, pending goes back to left.

The financial year runs 1 April to 31 March, shown on the Holidays page as, for example, "FY Apr 2026 – Mar 2027". Balances are created the first time you open My leave in a new financial year, and each type starts at its full annual quota.

A few consequences worth knowing:

• Quotas are not pro-rated. Someone joining in November still starts with 12 days of Casual Leave for that financial year, not a part of it.
• Unused days do not roll over on their own. A new financial year opens at the full quota; there is no year-end step in the interface that moves leftover days forward.
• The days come off the balance for the year you are in when you apply. Applying in March for leave that falls in April is counted against the balance you hold in March.

---

Applying for leave

1. Go to My space → Leave, or use Apply for leave in the Quick actions on your Dashboard.
2. Choose the Leave type. The line under the form tells you what that choice costs — "Casual Leave — 12 days left this financial year", or "Leave Without Pay — no quota to draw on, so nothing comes off your balances".
3. Pick the From and To dates. For a single day, set both to the same date. To cannot be earlier than From; if it is, the form says "To is before From" and the button stays disabled.
4. Tick Half day if you need only half of one day. The tick box is only available when From and To are the same date and the type allows it — otherwise the hint explains why ("Pick the same date for From and To to take half a day", or "Restricted Holiday cannot be taken as a half day").
5. Write a Reason. It is required, and it is what your approver reads when deciding — "Family wedding in Pune" is more use than "personal".
6. Click Apply for leave. The page confirms with "Your leave request has been sent for approval", the request appears under My requests as Pending, and the days move into pending on the balance card.

Your primary manager and everyone in HR / Ops or Super Admin are notified straight away, with a link into their approval queue.

MusterHR does not stop you applying for dates in the past, so a sick day you could not file at the time can still be recorded afterwards.

How the days are counted

MusterHR counts working days, not calendar days:

• Saturdays and Sundays are skipped. They are the company's weekly offs and are never deducted.
• Public holidays in the range are skipped. A day on the calendar as Public (office closed) costs you nothing.
• Optional (restricted) holidays are not skipped. The office is open on those days, so they count as ordinary working days unless you avail them separately.
• A half day always costs 0.5, and shows in My requests as "0.5 (½)".
• A Restricted Holiday counts as 1 day, even when the festival falls on a Saturday or Sunday, because the day itself is what you are taking.

So Priya applying from Thursday 12 to Wednesday 18 November has seven calendar days selected but five working days deducted — the Saturday and Sunday drop out. The hint under the form spells it out while you type: "7 days selected — weekly-offs and public holidays in the range are not deducted."

When the form refuses

---

Leave request statuses

Every request in My requests carries one of four statuses.

---

Cancelling a request

You can cancel your own request while it is Pending or Approved, from the Cancel button on its row in My requests.

1. Click Cancel on the row.
2. Read the confirmation. For an approved request it says the days go back into your balance and that this cannot be undone — you would have to apply again. For an unpaid type such as Work From Home it says the days are simply removed from your record, since nothing was deducted.
3. Click Cancel this leave to confirm, or Keep it to back out.

Cancelling cannot be undone, and there is no way to edit a request in place: cancel it and apply again with the dates you want.

Only the person who applied can cancel. A manager or HR cannot withdraw someone else's request on their behalf — they can only reject it while it is still pending.

---

Optional (restricted) holidays

Restricted holidays are the festivals not everyone observes — Ganesh Chaturthi, Christmas Eve, Makar Sankranti. The office stays open on those days. Each employee may take a limited number of them, and MusterHR ships with a quota of 2 a year.

Company → Holidays shows them in their own list under Optional (restricted) holidays, with your remaining quota in the Your optional days left tile ("2 of 2 · this financial year").

To take one:

1. Go to Company → Holidays.
2. Find the festival under Optional (restricted) holidays.
3. Click Avail on its row. That files a single-day Restricted Holiday leave request for you, with the reason "Optional holiday: Ganesh Chaturthi".
4. Wait for the decision. Until then the row shows Pending; once approved it shows Availed.

Each availed day needs approval like any other leave and counts against both your optional-holiday quota and the Restricted Holiday balance on My leave. A restricted holiday cannot be taken as a half day.

What the right-hand side of a row can show:

To give one back, cancel the request from My space → Leave — the day returns to your quota. The Holidays page points there once you have availed anything.

You can also reach the same thing from the leave form: choose Restricted Holiday, set From and To to the festival's date and apply. The date must be one that appears under Optional (restricted) holidays, or the form answers "That date isn't an optional (restricted) holiday."

---

Comp-off

If you worked on a public holiday or on a weekly off, you can claim a compensatory-off credit and spend it later as leave. It is a two-step arrangement: first you claim the day you worked, then — once that is approved — you apply for Comp Off leave against the credit.

Claiming the day you worked

1. Go to My space → Leave and scroll to Comp-off.
2. Set Day you worked. It must be in the past or today, within the last 90 days, and must be a public holiday or a weekly off. Claiming an ordinary working day is refused with "Comp-off can only be claimed for a public holiday or a weekly-off day you worked."
3. Tick Half day (½ credit) if you worked only part of the day.
4. Fill in What did you work on? — required, and the thing your approver reads. Something specific, such as "Production release support", makes the claim easy to approve.
5. Click Claim comp-off. The claim appears in the table below as Pending, with Valid until showing "Set on approval".

You can hold only one live claim per worked date. A second one is refused with "You already have a comp-off claim for this date" — though if a claim was rejected or cancelled, you may file for that date again.

The credit and its expiry

When your manager or HR approves the claim, the days become a spendable credit and Valid until fills in with a real date: 90 days from the day you worked, not from the day it was approved. Working a Sunday on 13 September 2026 gives a credit that lapses on 12 December 2026.

Your Comp Off balance card then reads, for example, "1 of 1 earned". When credits are close to lapsing the card says "1 day expiring soon" — that covers anything expiring within the next 15 days. Once past its date a credit simply stops counting; there is no way to extend it.

Spending a credit

Apply as you would for any leave, choosing Comp Off as the Leave type. Two things behave differently:

• The credit is taken the moment you apply, not when the request is approved. The form says as much: "Comp Off — 2 days of credit available, spent oldest first."
• Credits are spent oldest-expiring first, so a credit about to lapse is used before a fresh one.

If the Comp Off leave is rejected or you cancel it, the credit is returned and can be spent again — provided it has not expired in the meantime.

Comp-off claim statuses

Cancelling an approved claim removes those days of credit from your balance and cannot be undone. If the credit has already been spent by a Comp Off leave request, MusterHR refuses with "This credit is already used by a comp-off leave — cancel that leave first."

---

Approving leave

Approvals → Leave approvals holds both queues on one page: leave requests at the top, Comp-off claims below. The heading counts what is waiting — "3 leave requests and 1 comp-off claim awaiting your decision".

Who approves whom

If someone has no manager set on their record, their request still reaches HR and Super Admins, who can decide it. Reporting lines are set on the employee record — see Employee records and profiles.

Deciding a request

1. Go to Approvals → Leave approvals.
2. Read the row: employee name and code, leave type, dates, days and the reason. A type that deducts nothing is flagged "no balance deducted", so you know whether saying yes costs the person any balance.
3. Click Approve to accept. The employee is notified and their pending days become used days.
4. Or click Reject. A confirmation opens with a Reason (optional) box — "Two people already off that week" is the kind of note that saves a follow-up conversation. Click Reject to confirm. The days go straight back to the employee's balance.

Comp-off claims work the same way, with the worked date and credit in place of dates and days. Approving one adds the credit to the employee's Comp Off balance and starts its 90-day clock; rejecting adds nothing.

Both queues are shared, so a manager and HR may be looking at the same row. Whoever clicks first wins, and the other sees "This request has already been decided by someone else." Refresh the page and the row will have gone.

A decision cannot be reversed from the interface. If leave was approved in error, the employee has to cancel it from My space → Leave.

---

The company holiday calendar

Company → Holidays shows one financial year at a time — the current one — with three tiles at the top: how many public holidays there are ("office closed"), how many optional ones ("office open unless you avail one"), and your own optional days left.

Past dates stay on the list, greyed out, so the year reads as a whole.

A new workspace starts with an indicative India calendar for the financial year it was created in — Independence Day, Gandhi Jayanti, Diwali, Christmas, Republic Day, Holi as public holidays, and Ambedkar Jayanti, Bakrid, Ganesh Chaturthi, Govardhan Puja, Christmas Eve and Makar Sankranti as optional. Several of those move with the lunar calendar and the public/optional split is a company decision, so HR should confirm and edit the list each year.

Adding a holiday (HR / Ops and Super Admins)

1. Go to Company → Holidays and click Add a holiday, or scroll to the Add a holiday card at the bottom.
2. Pick the Date. It has to fall inside the financial year the page is showing, since the calendar covers one year at a time.
3. Choose the Type — Public (office closed) or Optional (restricted).
4. Enter the Name, for example "Diwali".
5. Add a Note (optional) if it needs one — a region, or which offices it applies to.
6. Click Add holiday. The page confirms "Holiday added. It now appears in the FY Apr 2026 – Mar 2027 calendar."

Only one holiday can exist on a given date; a second is refused with "A holiday already exists on that date."

Removing a holiday

Click the bin icon on the holiday's row, read the confirmation and click Remove holiday.

Removing affects everyone in the company, and there is no undo — you would have to add it again. Take care with a date that has already passed or that people have planned around: a public holiday you delete stops being skipped in the working-day count for leave applied after the change, and an optional holiday you delete can no longer be availed.

Changing the calendar does not rewrite leave that has already been filed. Requests keep the number of days they were counted at when they were submitted.

---

Reports

Payroll & reports → Reports → Leave summary gives approved and pending days by leave type for a financial year, with Download CSV. It counts requests whose start date falls between 1 April and 31 March of the year you pick, across the whole company, and leaves out types nobody requested. Reports are covered in Reports, settings and administration.

For today's picture rather than the year's, Approvals → My team shows who is on leave right now: an approved leave shows as "On leave · Sick Leave" or "Half-day · Casual Leave" against the person's name, and the On leave tile counts them. See Attendance.

---

Related chapters

• Attendance — clocking in, the month view, correction requests and the team view
• Roles and permissions — who can approve, and why a page may be missing from your sidebar
• Employee records and profiles — reporting lines, and linking a sign-in to an employee record
• Reports, settings and administration — the Leave summary report and exports
• FAQ and troubleshooting — if something on these pages does not behave as described