Come December and you will notice most HR personnel’s managing HRIS systems become anxious about the year-end processing of leave accrual.

There are many factors which contribute to this worry. Some are technical which can be easily managed with some customizations or modifications in the system to completely automate the set leave policies in the system, while some are due to long term attendance policies which fail to create logic for niche rules / policies that are practiced and no one bothers to update the rules best fitted for present time / industry standards.

From our experience, below features are a good to have features in HRIS systems to automate the leave accrual processes.

1. Intervention involving spreadsheet work e.g. Accrual days, carry forward, lapse rules
2. Permit application of leaves for the next accrual year in the advance prior to accrual closing without limiting the automatic leave accrual computation
3. Compute the Earned leave prorated on total present days basis automatically with exceptions like LOP days, absent days 
4. Handle the Leave application exceptions with combination of leave, co-off, Tour application
5. Allow half-day leave combinations with half-day co-off, Out duty, Regularization applications 
6. Handle pending leave applications processing during leave accrual
7. Allow different policy configurations of a leave type department wise , category wise, grade wise
8. Option for managing niche leaves like accidental leave without showing leave balance to employees 
9. Provision for monthly, quarterly, six monthly or yearly accrual flexibility leave type wise 
10. Provide option to manage leave accrual based on age, service completion tenure & grade if such rules are applicable in policy
11. Offer flexibility for different approval workflows for different leave types and scenarios for negative leave balance, leave duration & encashment application
12. Generate statutory report formats for leave reports like leave with wages card form no. 14. Form H etc.
13. Easy of access to blue collar / shop floor employees from KIOSK or mobile app
14. Handle escalation matrix for reminder mails for pending application or auto approval after certain days of application

We observed that many organizations struggle with challenges related to above mentioned points which limit the complete automation claim made by several HRIS systems.

There is a gap in claiming a feature present in the product by vendors and actual working of the feature when systems are implemented & in use by the client. Most times certain test scenarios are missed, failure in test cases, adequate test environment infrastructure including testing automation is not available to at vendor to thoroughly test the committed features which leads to customer dissatisfaction and customer gets the feeling of playing the tester for the software.

The gap is also due to incomplete sharing / missing points of policy requirement information to the vendor by HR team or incomplete probing of detailed underlying requirement by sales team. 

Most of the automation challenges are also due to limiting system access to all employees and failure for reminder mails / auto approval matrix which result in a lot of pending applications, pending approvals as well as manual follow-ups before payroll processing and eventually lead to stand-off with the HR. This directly affects the employee satisfaction.

Feel free to contribute your views in comments section.