New Features for Part Time Staff and Multiple Locations

We're excited to announce the release of Working Patterns - a powerful new feature designed specifically for teams with part-time staff, flexible shift patterns, or employees working across multiple locations. If you've ever struggled to accurately track leave for employees who work 4-day weeks, rotating shifts, or follow different national holidays, this update is for you.

Until now, Simple Leave worked on the assumption that all employees followed the same company-wide working pattern and observed the same holidays. While this works perfectly for many teams, we heard from customers managing more complex scenarios: part-time employees who work specific days each week, shift workers with rotating schedules, and multi-location teams where employees observe different national holidays.

What Problems Does This Solve?

Working Patterns gives you the flexibility to configure unique working schedules for individual employees, ensuring accurate leave calculations and calendar views that reflect reality. When an employee with a custom working pattern raises a leave request, the system automatically takes their unique working days into account, provides correct leave balance calculations, and shows only their actual working days on the calendar.

How It Works

The feature offers two key configuration options: custom working days patterns (define which weekdays are working days for an employee) and custom bank holidays and company holidays (configure specific holidays for employees in different locations). For example, a part-time employee might work Monday-Thursday with Friday as a regular non-working day, or an employee in Northern Ireland can observe St. Patrick's Day while the rest of your UK team doesn't.

Working Pattern settings apply when new requests are created. If you change an employee's working pattern, it won't retroactively affect approved requests - the calculations in those requests are locked in place. When you create a new leave cycle for the next year, the working days pattern carries forward automatically, making it easy to maintain consistent configurations across periods.