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Leave and holidays

Run time-off and keep the firm calendar accurate, so the schedule's capacity line dips exactly when people are actually away.

What you'll achieve

Request and approve leave, then add a custom firm-wide closure, so approved time off and closures lower people's available hours on the schedule.

You'll end up with: A maintained leave and holiday calendar where approved leave and closures reduce capacity, and the swimlanes reflect who's really available.

Before you start

Set your team's availability

Time off isn't only an HR record in Monument, it bends the numbers you plan against. A person's available hours are their work pattern minus public holidays, custom closures, and approved leave, and those available hours are the capacity line the schedule draws in the resource swimlanes. Keep leave and holidays accurate and the schedule stops lying to you about who's free.

Leave and holidays live on two separate pages under Resources. Leave is where requests get submitted and approved; Holidays is where the firm's public dates and custom closures are managed. We'll run a request through Leave for Sarah Chen at Northlight Architects, then add a custom closure on Holidays.

Balances come from entitlements, not a self-serve setting

A leave entitlement gives someone a balance for a leave type and year, but Monument does not currently block a request when no entitlement exists. There's no self-serve screen where you set your own entitlement, an administrator manages that. When one exists, the balance card shows entitled hours, hours remaining, and hours currently pending, all sourced from that entitlement. Leave can still be requested and approved without one, so don't wait on an entitlement to get started; ask an administrator to configure it so the balance card and approval decision have the right context.

Sarah's Annual Leave balance for the year starts at 152.0 out of 152.0 hours. Submit an 8-hour request and the card shows 8.0h pending, still against the full 152.0. Only once that request is approved does the balance actually move, down to 144.0 out of 152.0.

Only approved leave changes the number

A new leave request is saved as pending when approval is required, or approved immediately when it is not. A pending request can then be approved, rejected, or cancelled. Pending hours show on the balance card so you can see what's been asked for, but they don't reduce it. Approval is the one action that actually spends the balance, and it's also what drops that week's capacity line on the schedule; any allocation sitting on those days can tip into the red. See balance capacity in the swimlanes.

The balance counts every hour actually taken

Approved requests aren't the only way leave lands on the balance. A leave type set to skip approval can be logged straight onto the calendar, no request at all, and it counts the moment it's logged, the same as an approved request. The balance always reflects real time recorded against that leave type, not just requests that went through an approval step.

Request and approve leave

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On the Leave page, check the Annual Leave balance card before requesting anything: it reads 152.0 out of 152.0 hours.
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Click Request Leave. The form defaults to Annual Leave with a one-day range starting today, so there's nothing to change.
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Click Submit Request. The request appears as Pending in My Leave Requests, and lands in Pending Approvals for whoever signs off.
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Approve the request. Its status updates from Pending to Approved, it moves out of Pending Approvals, and the balance drops to 144.0 out of 152.0 hours.

Requesting and approving can be the same person

Sarah Chen is Northlight Architects' organisation owner in this walkthrough, so she both submits and approves her own request. On a bigger team, the approver is usually someone else, a manager reviewing requests for the people they oversee, not the requester themselves.

Some leave types skip approval

A leave type can be configured not to require approval. When it doesn't, the request is accepted straight away with no approver step. Annual Leave, used here, always waits for a decision before it counts against the balance.

Leave also shows up on the Time page

Requesting leave from the Leave page is only one way in. The Time page's work list carries a Leave section too, right after Admin, and it treats leave types differently depending on whether they need approval.

A leave type that doesn't need approval works exactly like an admin or client task on that list: drag it onto a day and it's logged straight away, no request and no approval step in between. A leave type that needs approval can't be dragged. Clicking it instead opens the same request form you'd reach from the Leave page, with that leave type already selected.

However it's logged, an approved request writes one day of time for every working day in its range, using the person's normal hours for that day unless the request set specific hours. Approving is the step that actually fills the timesheet and drops the capacity line, not just a decision recorded somewhere else.

Configure leave types in Settings

Annual Leave, Unpaid Leave, and whatever else the practice adds, come from Settings, not the Leave page. Open Settings, then Leave, to find the Leave types card.

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Open Settings, then Leave, and find the Leave types card.
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Each row has a Name, a Paid switch, a Needs approval switch, and an Active switch. Add leave type starts a new row; edits stay local until Save.

Paid decides whether logged time against that type costs anything; unpaid leave still counts as time, it just costs nothing. Needs approval decides whether staff can log the type themselves from the Time page or have to submit a request first.

Retire a type instead of deleting it

A leave type with any recorded time against it can't be deleted, Monument keeps that history. Turn Active off instead: the type disappears from new requests and from the Time page's Leave list, while every entry already logged against it stays exactly where it is.

Turn leave approvals or balances off

Settings, then Leave holds two switches above the Leave types card. Together they decide how much of the workflow above a practice actually uses.

Staff request leave and an approver signs it off. Turn this off and every leave type gets typed straight onto the timesheet, the same as any admin task. Nobody requests leave and nobody approves it. Turning the switch off doesn't discard a request that's still waiting: Monument approves every pending request and writes its days to the timesheet first. A confirmation dialog states how many requests that is before you save.

Track leave balances against a yearly entitlement. Turn this off and balances, plus the Leave types card's Hours per year column, disappear everywhere. Nothing is deleted. Entitlements stay stored, so turning the switch back on brings the same balances back.

Both switches also change the Leave types card. With approvals off, its Needs approval switches are greyed out. With balances off, its Hours per year fields are greyed out. The stored values stay as they are. Everything else about a leave type, its name, whether it's paid, whether it's active, and its public holiday link, stays the same.

With approvals off, Request Leave, Pending Approval, Approved Leave and Pending Approvals disappear from Leave & Holidays, on both desktop and mobile. Balances and the Holidays tab stay. The Time page's sidebar still lists every active leave type as its own row. Turn both switches off and that whole section collapses to one row named Holidays, which opens the Holidays page.

Leave is still logged as time

Turning either switch off changes how leave gets onto the timesheet, not whether it counts. A day of leave is still an ordinary time entry, so capacity, timesheets and reports read it exactly as before. One place still depends on requests: the schedule's leave overlay and the Upcoming leave list are both fed by leave requests, so a practice with approvals off sees leave there only as logged time, not as a request.

Generate public holidays from the organisation's location

Public holidays and custom closures live on the separate Holidays page, reached from the Holidays tab. The organisation is already set to Australia, and Sync Public Holidays is what actually turns that location into a year of dates on the calendar.

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Click the Holidays tab to open the Holidays page.
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Click Sync Public Holidays. Monument generates a full year of Australian dates, New Year's Day among them, straight from the organisation's location.

A location has to be set first

Sync Public Holidays reads the country from the organisation's location in settings. If the button isn't doing anything, that location isn't set yet, add it in settings, then sync again from here.

Add a custom, firm-wide holiday

A custom holiday is anything outside that public-holiday calendar, an office retreat, a shutdown week, a local event, and it reduces capacity firm-wide the same way an approved leave request does.

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In the top bar, click Add Custom Holiday to open a closure of your own.
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Enter Studio Retreat in Holiday Name and set its date.
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Leave Applies to everyone switched on, since a studio retreat closes the whole firm, not just one team.
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Click Add Holiday. Studio Retreat joins the list as a Custom row, alongside the public holidays already synced.

Closures can be scoped to groups

Applies to everyone is on by default, but it can be turned off and scoped to specific groups through the visibility filters instead. That's the tool for a closure that only affects one studio or team, not the whole firm.

Troubleshooting

A balance looks wrong or missing. There's no self-serve way to set or edit your own entitlement. If the number looks off, or there isn't one, that's an administrator task, not a setting on the Leave page.
Capacity didn't drop after a request went in. It's still pending. Only an approved request lowers the balance and the capacity line, submitting alone doesn't.
A closure only some people can see. It's scoped to groups through the visibility filters. Switch it to Applies to everyone, or fix which groups the filter includes.
Sync Public Holidays isn't available. Your organisation has no country set. Add it in settings, then sync from the Holidays page.
A healthy schedule suddenly shows red. Someone's leave was just approved, or a holiday landed, shrinking that week's capacity. The work didn't grow, the line dropped. Rebalance against it.

Where this fits next

Your calendar now drives availability accurately. To see and act on it:

Read and rebalance the capacity it produces: balance capacity in the swimlanes.
Make sure each person's baseline week is right in the first place: set up your team.