Year-end is the one moment in the leave calendar where small policy choices cost real money. Carry over too much and you build a balance-sheet liability; expire too aggressively and you end up paying out leave you did not intend to encash. Most HR teams handle this in a spreadsheet the week before the cutover, and most of them get at least one employee wrong.
The new year-end leave declaration in Leave Balance replaces that spreadsheet. You preview the entire close before you commit, override individual employees where the policy needs to bend, and let the encashment numbers flow straight into payroll.
Why year-end is harder than it looks
A leave year does not end the same way for every employee in every region. The same policy can produce four different outcomes for four people on the same day:
- A UK employee on maternity who legally must carry over their Regulation 13 leave.
- An Australian employee at 9 weeks of accrued annual leave whose award allows directed leave above 8 weeks.
- A New Zealand employee whose anniversary-based entitlement just rolled over and now needs an OWP/AWE recalculation.
- A Nepali employee whose home leave year follows the BS calendar and whose unused balance is statutorily encashable.
Run that through 200 employees and you understand why the spreadsheet exists — and why it is wrong.
What the year-end declaration does
The feature treats year-end as a three-step workflow: dry-run, decide, sync.
1. Dry-run preview
Before any balance is touched, Leave Balance simulates the close across every active employee and every leave type. The preview shows, per person:
- Opening balance for the new year
- What carries over
- What expires
- What converts to encashment
The dry-run window is configurable, so you can run it weeks ahead of the actual cutover and share the output with finance before anyone signs off.
2. Per-employee and per-policy overrides
Policies set the default — overrides handle reality. Admins can override:
- Expire / encashment-only / carry-over-only at the policy level for a one-off year (e.g. “this year we are letting everyone carry over an extra five days because of the project freeze”).
- The decision per employee (e.g. one person’s carry-over cap is lifted because of approved sickness absence).
Overrides are audited. The dry-run re-runs against the overrides so you see the final picture before committing.
leave emails? Track your employee's leave with Leave Balance
3. Payroll encashment sync
When the close is committed, encashment amounts are pushed to payroll via webhook. In Nepal, where leave encashment is taxable annual salary under §27 and triggers a TDS hook, the value lands in the employee’s payslip the same period — no second data entry, no reconciliation drift.
For UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the same webhook delivers the encashment line to whichever payroll system you have wired up.
Region-specific rules we built in
Year-end is not one feature — it is four, behind a single screen.
United Kingdom
The Working Time Regulations split the 5.6-week statutory entitlement into two: the 4 weeks of Regulation 13 leave (generally not carryable, with specific statutory exceptions) and the 1.6 weeks of Regulation 13A leave (carryable by agreement). Leave Balance treats those buckets independently and applies the right default to each, with overrides for the maternity, sickness, and long-term-leave exceptions where Regulation 13 leave must carry forward.
Australia
Annual leave does not expire under the Fair Work Act. Year-end here is mostly about excessive-leave triggers — the 8-week threshold many awards use to allow employer-directed leave. The dry-run flags employees crossing that line so you can act before the new year starts, not three months into it.
New Zealand
The Holidays Act runs on individual anniversary dates rather than a single org-wide year-end. The declaration handles that by computing each employee’s roll-over independently, recalculating ordinary weekly pay (OWP) and average weekly earnings (AWE) at the right point.
Nepal
The Labour Act 2074 ties leave entitlements to the Bikram Sambat calendar. The year-end declaration excludes event-based leave types (which do not roll over by definition) and respects BS boundary dates rather than the Gregorian 31 December. Encashment values flow through to PayrollApp, where they are added to taxable annual salary and the TDS hook is triggered automatically.
What it replaces
If you currently close your leave year with any of these, the year-end declaration replaces all of them:
- A spreadsheet exported from your HRIS, edited manually, re-uploaded as a balance adjustment
- A separate “carry-over policy memo” sent to managers asking them to flag exceptions
- A back-and-forth with payroll to compute encashment values
- An end-of-year reconciliation that finds the three employees you missed
How to roll it out
If you are already on Leave Balance, the year-end declaration is in the admin sidebar and on the dashboard banner during the lookahead window. The first time you run it:
- Open the Year-End Declaration screen.
- Run a dry-run against your current policies.
- Share the preview CSV with finance.
- Apply per-employee overrides where needed.
- Re-run the dry-run, then commit.
The whole loop takes minutes, not days, and the audit trail means next year’s close starts from a known-good state.
leave emails? Track your employee's leave with Leave Balance
The bigger point
Year-end should not be the most stressful week of the HR calendar. The reason it usually is comes down to one thing: most leave systems treat year-end as a button you press, not a decision you preview. Once you can see the close before you commit it, the decisions stop being scary and start being routine.
That is the goal of the year-end declaration — and the reason it works the same way whether you are closing 12 employees in Manchester, 80 in Auckland, or 400 across Kathmandu and Pokhara.