6 Reasons to Make Leave Management System a Priority

Navigating the leave management minefield without a leave management system is a tricky challenge. When you’re equipped only with conventional tools like paper forms, emails, and excel sheets, your chances of survival are pretty low. Even small missteps can cause disasters like resource crunch, payroll processing errors, and legal complications.

Despite the high impact on productivity and employee engagement, SMBs are not ready to revamp their awkward manual process of handling leave requests. At several SMBs, the employees are still running behind their managers with leave forms to get a signature. Whereas, the managers are scurrying around excel sheets to figure out leave balances.

Even the commonly-used Google forms lack the efficiency to handle some prominent leave management problems. All these incapable tools just eat away at the productivity and efficiency of your employees.

What good are your leave management softwares if they demand too much manual intervention to function properly? The distorted data obtained through these archaic tools is useless.

You can neither gather insight nor pinpoint problems from this cluttered mess without manual sorting. Even then, the accuracy is questionable. To stay clear of the administrative arsenic, legal landmines, and payroll pitfalls you need a robust leave management system. Before you start exploring the software marketplace for an ideal leave management software, you’ll need to understand the ins and outs of the leave management process.

What is leave management?

Leave management, also known as time-off management, refers to the systems and guidelines that oversee employees' requests for time away from work, including instances like vacations, public holidays, medical leave, and family-related absences.

Why leave management is important?

Although some employers want to keep employees at work all the time, they need their fair share of time-off to rest and recuperate. An overworked employee is an unproductive one. Leave management is the process of managing employee time-off requests in a fair, accurate, and efficient way.

The responsibility of handling employee vacation requests falls onto the shoulders of supervisors, HR staff, and workforce management staff.

Features of a Leave Management System

A Leave Management System(LMS) automates the leave request process, making it hassle-free for both the management and the employees. The solution of your choice should be robust enough to seamlessly handle all the stages involved in a leave management process: application, approval/rejection, filing leaves, managing leave balance, and analysis.

A good leave management system will have the following functionalities:

1. All-in-one Dashboard

Employees can view their leave balance and check their co-workers’ days-off while applying for leave. Supervisors and HR staff must have access to employee leave balance, holiday lists, department schedule, and workforce coverage to evaluate leave requests better.

2. Configurable Fields (Leave Type, Policy, Holiday List)

Policies and procedures vary from one organization to another. A stringent leave management system with ‘one size fits all mantra’ may not suit your needs. Look for a product that lets your staff customize the fields to fit your organization’s policies.

3. Cloud-Based

A cloud-based online leave management system will not only offer multi-channel, on-the-go access, but also remove hassles like software installations and updates. Your employees can apply, approve, or reject leave requests from anywhere at any time.

4. Auto-Update Leave Balance

Purchasing a leave management software is useless if your HR staff has to compute and update the leave balance of your employees manually. Your attendance management system must track the leave history of all employees and display it to both employees and their managers.

5. Customizable Approval Workflow

You must be able to create customizable workflows and set up a department-wise hierarchy to ensure a streamlined process. Once an employee selects his/her department, the pre-defined workflow must auto-populate.

6. Seamless Integration

Legacy software is archaic, outdated, and creates data silos. A product that offers seamless integration with your other HR Management Softwares, payroll tools, timesheet management, etc. will save time, eliminate silos, and enable cross-functional reporting.

7. At-a-Glance Reporting

Your product should include a built-in reporting module that creates interactive reports based on the acquired data. With employee-wise and company-wide reports, organizations can easily analyse patterns and acquire actionable insights.

Benefits of Using a Leave Management System

A leave management system is an all-in-one platform that handles all employee vacation requests while ensuring smooth functioning of their operations. Here’s what a robust leave management software does for you:

• Eliminates paperwork
• Removes manual interventions
• Improves communication
• Offers real-time visibility of data
• Ensures legal compliance
• Reflects your organization’s values

The Solution to Your Leave Management Problems: Kissflow HR Cloud

It’s time to find a leave management system that lets you hover over the minefield instead of tripping through it. Take charge of your leave management process and automate it, save management time, reduce payroll errors, remove manual dependencies, eliminate paperwork, and adopt a straightforward approach to handle leave requests. A cloud-based SaaS Platform can solve all the problems associated with leave management and make it hassle-free.

Several organizations around the world use Kissflow HR Cloud to streamline their leave management process. Our easily customizable leave management system reduces the time and effort your HR staff spend on paperwork, centralizes the leave and holiday information for easy accessibility, lowers any chance of time-off abuse, and boosts the productivity of the overall organization.

Reduce the overall effort and time you devote to leave management with Kissflow HR Cloud. Sign up for a risk-free demo and try for yourself!