For shift-based teams, the most common question employees ask is not “how much leave do I have left?” — it’s “what shift am I on next week, and can I take Friday off?” Those two questions live in two different products in most companies. We just put them in the same one.
Leave Balance now includes employee shift self-service. Each employee sees their assigned shifts in the same app where they request leave, and the two views talk to each other.
What employees see
A new My Shift view shows:
- Upcoming shifts with start time, end time, location, and assigned role
- Calendar view with weekend shading and the current-time indicator
- Visual conflict warnings when a pending leave request overlaps a scheduled shift
- The ability to request a shift swap or trigger an absence flow without leaving the app
For Nepal customers running PayrollApp, the same view also reflects shift allowances that flow into payroll automatically — so when a worker picks up a public holiday shift, the corresponding allowance is visible in the same place.
Why this matters for shift-heavy teams
The friction in shift work isn’t the rostering — managers do that fine in any tool. The friction is everything between “the roster is published” and “everyone shows up.” That gap includes:
- Employees forgetting to check the roster
- Conflicting leave requests filed against shifts the employee didn’t realise they had
- Last-minute swaps via WhatsApp that the manager never sees
- Shift allowances disputed at month-end because nobody can prove who worked when
Surfacing the shift schedule next to the leave balance — in the app the employee already opens to file leave — closes most of those gaps without any process change.
leave emails? Track your employee's leave with Leave Balance
Where this fits vs dedicated rostering tools
We are not trying to replace Deputy, When I Work, or Connecteam for companies whose primary product is rostering. Those tools are excellent at the rostering job — drag-and-drop scheduling, demand forecasting, time clocks at the door.
What Leave Balance offers is the employee-facing half of shift work, integrated with leave. If you’re a 20–150-person team where shift work is a part of operations but not the entire business, this is probably enough. If you’re running a 500-employee retail chain with five locations and weekly demand forecasts, keep Deputy.
The dividing line we use with prospects:
| If your team is… | Use |
|---|---|
| All shift workers, complex demand forecasting, location-based clock-ins | Deputy / When I Work + integrate with us for leave |
| Mixed salaried + shift workers, basic shift assignment, leave is the bigger pain | Leave Balance native shift self-service |
| All salaried, no shift component | Just Leave Balance |
How it works under the hood
The integration with leave is the part most other tools get wrong. Three things that matter:
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Leave requests check shift overlap before submission. When an employee files leave for next Friday, the system checks whether they’re scheduled and shows the conflict. The leave still goes through; the conflict is a flag, not a block, because sometimes you do want to take leave on a scheduled day. The manager just sees both data points side by side.
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Approved leave updates the shift roster automatically. No double-entry. The roster shows the employee as “on leave” once approval lands.
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Shift allowance calculations stay accurate. For Nepal payroll, where festival, public-holiday, and shift differential allowances flow into the payslip, leave taken during a scheduled shift is excluded from the allowance calculation correctly.
What’s coming
This first release is focused on the employee-facing view. Roadmap items we’re working on:
- Shift swap requests with peer approval
- Open-shift bidding for last-minute coverage
- Mobile push notifications when a shift changes within 24 hours
We’ll roll those out incrementally rather than wait for a “v2 release” — same as everything else in Leave Balance.
leave emails? Track your employee's leave with Leave Balance
The bigger point
The boundary between “leave management” and “shift management” is a software-vendor convenience, not a real one. Both answer the same operational question — who is working when — from different angles. Splitting them across two products creates integration overhead that doesn’t pay back.
For shift-mixed SMBs, putting both in one place is the obvious move. We just shipped it.