Creating holiday allowances within Breathe, and assigning them to your team, lets your people know how much holiday they've got to use for the year.

Breathe is designed to make it easy for people to know what their holiday allowance is, what they've used so far, and how much holiday they've got left.

What's included in this guide:

First, make sure you have the right holiday year set up. Do this by heading to configure > settings > holiday year.

Once the holiday year is set up and you've calculated everyone's holiday allowance, the next thing to do is create the holiday allowances.

Holiday allowances can be created in days or hours, and you can create as many as you'd like. You can also add in carryover as well as length in service.

To create holiday allowances, head to Configure > Settings > Holiday allowances > +

You can also set a holiday allowance as default, so that any new people added to your Breathe account will automatically be assigned to this holiday allowance.

This is shown below:

Statutory holidays are bank holidays that employees are entitled to. Employees should book bank holidays off manually if statutory bank holidays are added to the total holiday allowance. In this case, ensure the "Receives Statutory Holidays" option is unticked in their profile under More > Working Patterns & Holiday Allowances.

If the "Entitled to Statutory Holidays" option is ticked, the system will automatically allocate these days without deducting leave. The 'Receives statutory holidays' setting is crucial in determining whether bank holidays are deducted from an employee's leave allowance.

Enabling this setting ensures that such days are excluded from the leave allowance, while disabling it includes these holidays in the deductions.

In Breathe, you can switch on statutory holidays (for a specific country) without having to manually add this to your people's allowances.

This means that if your team are entitled to 28 days holiday (including bank holidays), you should set their holiday allowance as 20 days.

This means that the employee has 20 days to book off themselves, but if they book a week off on a bank holiday Monday, for example, Breathe will know to only deduct 4 days (instead of 5) from their holiday allowance.

You can either bulk-assign statutory holidays to multiple employees, or assign them individually.

To assign individually, head to the employee's profile > More > Work pattern & holiday allowance.

Here, you can tick the 'Yes' box and assign the employee to receive statutory holidays for the relevant country:

Like working patterns, you can assign a holiday allowance individually or in bulk.

To assign individually, head to the Employee's profile > More tab > Work pattern & holiday allowance > edit page.

Select the holiday allowance you want to assign from the drop-down menu

Please note: If no options show in the drop-down, this means holiday allowances haven't been created yet. Head to Configure > Settings > Holiday allowances > + to get started (and then assign to your people).

Trying to change a holiday allowance from days to hours or from hours to days? Please follow the steps in the guide below:

As mentioned, Breathe won't pro rata holiday for part-time staff - so make sure you've got their holiday entitlement calculated before creating a holiday allowance for them.

If you're unsure, you can use our free holiday calculator or visit the GOV website.

For more information on setting up holiday allowances for part-time employees, here's a helpful guide:

To schedule a change of a holiday allowance simply head to the employees profile and select More > Working Pattern and Holiday Allowance

Click on the Holiday Allowance tab and press the + Icon as displayed below...

Select the new Holiday Allowance that the employee will be moving to and set the effective date and press add Holiday Allowance.

Please note:

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