Time & Leave Module

The Time & Leave module covers PTO requests, leave balances, timesheets, team availability, and company / Sparko-managed holiday calendars.

Overview

The Time & Leave module provides:

PTO request submission, approval, and cancellation
Per-policy leave balances + accruals + carryover
Custom leave types (with curated icon picker)
Team Calendar with privacy-by-default gating
Country holiday calendars (Sparko-curated, auto-imported) + custom company holidays
Timesheets with clock-in / clock-out + break tracking
Per-policy HR Admin manage mode with audit trail

Employee leave policies do not automatically cover contractors or freelancers. They can use an explicitly agreed contractor time-away arrangement; employee accruals and employee timesheets remain separate.

Contractor time away

Set reusable suggestions under Admin > People > Contract templates > Drafting defaults > Contractors and freelancers. Company defaults can be overridden for an entity. Defaults never enroll a person or change a signed agreement.

For a new agreement, expand Time away in the agreement questionnaire, choose the arrangement, and confirm the actual engagement facts. Sparko includes the agreed wording in the document and activates it only after the agreement is completed. Paid time away requires a monthly retainer.

For an existing contractor, open their profile, Overview > Time Off > Record agreed time off. Another authorized HR person must select an uploaded signed agreement or amendment PDF, enter the effective dates and matching terms, and confirm their review. This records HR's attestation; Sparko does not verify external signatures. Each change needs a new document. Reviewed evidence is retained and cannot be deleted or re-signed through the ordinary document controls.

The supported arrangements are:

No agreed tracking: no optional time-away policy is active. Mandatory rights are unaffected.
Unavailability notices: the contractor records planned absence directly; the status is Recorded, with no approval timestamp.
Agreed paid time away: an annual allowance in whole or half weekdays, for a monthly retainer. Used and pending paid days from earlier versions count toward the same calendar-year allowance. There is no proration or carryover.
Agreed unpaid time away: no annual cap. Approval can be required, and the agreement specifies whether fees stay unchanged or an invoice adjustment is separately agreed and recorded manually.

All contractor arrangements count weekdays, Monday to Friday, without holiday deductions. This counting basis does not set working hours. Sparko does not calculate deductions, infer hourly or daily rates, or change a retainer or invoice automatically. If approval is agreed, HR must assign an active qualified approver; a missing approver does not cause automatic approval.

A future version takes effect on its agreed date. Requests crossing a policy boundary or calendar year must be split. Existing requests and prior agreement versions remain visible. A contractor cannot cancel time away that has already started to reclaim allowance; HR can record an audited correction.

The profile shows No current agreed time-away tracking separately from a zero paid balance. Paid arrangements show the available, used and pending days. Equipment assignments, learning eligibility and expense permissions continue to use their existing controls; recording time away does not grant insurance or other employee benefits.

PTO Dashboard

The PTO Dashboard is the employee landing surface for Time & Leave. It opens at Time & Leave > PTO Dashboard.

Layout

The header carries the page title, a to approve pill (managers only), My requests and Request time off. Below it sit cards: My upcoming time off, Team out this week, Recent activity, Coverage signals (approvers only) and My balance.

Time & Leave

Your balances, requests, and team approvals

3 to approve My requests Request time off My upcoming time offVacation · 2 days · Approved Team out this weekWho is away, and when Recent activityYour latest decided requests Coverage signalsOverlaps in the next 30 days My balanceDays left per policy

Approving from the dashboard

If you approve time off or timesheets, a to approve pill appears in the header with the number waiting. Select it to open a drawer. Time off and Timesheets are listed as separate groups, up to five rows each: time off oldest request first, and timesheets by the week they cover, earliest week first. Each row has an Approve button. Select a row to open it in My Hub, where you can see the details or reject it. Open all in My Hub at the bottom opens the full queue, and Done closes the drawer. Approving time off shows any coverage conflicts first, then returns you to the drawer. When nobody is waiting, the pill is hidden.

Requesting time off

Click + Request time off to open the request modal:

Pick the leave type. The request form loads the types that apply to the selected dates, including eligible custom types. If the catalogue cannot load, use Try again; the form does not substitute employee policies.
Pick the date range (or a single day).
Add a note.
Submit. Your manager is notified and the request appears under "Pending approval" until they decide.

You can cancel a pending or future-approved request at any time from the same dashboard.

Coverage signals (managers & HR)

If you approve time off, the dashboard adds a Coverage signals card. It scans the next 30 days and flags date ranges where two or more people on the same team are out at once, which is when coverage is actually at risk. Each signal shows the department, the dates, how many of the team are out (with a severity of Watch / At risk / High risk based on the share of the team affected), and whether any of the overlap is still awaiting approval. When the count includes a request nobody has approved yet, the signal adds "includes 1 pending" (or however many), since the Team Calendar does not draw a request until it is approved. A manager sees only their own reporting line, their own time off included; when you are one of the people out, the signal says so (it reads "You and your report out" when the other person reports to you, and "You and your colleague out" otherwise). HR sees every department. Selecting a signal opens the Team Calendar for a closer look.

Team Calendar

Open Time & Leave > Team Calendar to see who's out across your team or company. My team shows you and everyone who reports to you, so the overlaps the Coverage signals card counts are all on it. The calendar shows approved time off; a request still waiting for approval is not on it until it is approved.

Two view modes

Month: calendar grid with a chip per person per day they're out.
Timeline: employees down the rows, days across the columns, blocks spanning leave periods.

Use the toggle in the page header to switch.

Both views follow your company's configured work week. Weeks start on your first working day, and your non-working days are shaded, so a Sunday to Thursday company sees Friday and Saturday shaded rather than Saturday and Sunday. HR sets this in Admin > Settings > Time & Leave.

Privacy by default

When you look at someone else's leave on the Team Calendar:

Your direct manager and HR Admins see the specific leave type (e.g. "Vacation", "Sick", "Bereavement") and any notes.
Other colleagues see only that the person is "Out" on those dates, never the type or notes.

This privacy gate is enforced server-side: the API does not return leave-type details to viewers who shouldn't see them. There is no way to expose it through the frontend alone.

Rules summary:

HR Admin / time_leave.requests.view_all → always sees full detail.
Manager (time_leave.requests.view_team) → full detail for their direct and indirect reports.
Everyone else → "Out" only, except for themselves.

PTO Policies (HR Admin)

HR Admins manage PTO policies + leave types at Time & Leave > PTO Policy.

View mode (overview)

The default view is a flat read-only table showing all active policies with 7 columns: name, scope, accrual rule, carryover, leave types covered, employees on this policy, last updated. An Edit policies button in the top-right opens the Manage interface for HR Admins.

PTO Policies Edit policies

Policy	Scope	Accrual	Carryover	Leave types	Employees	Updated
Full-time US	Global	15 d/yr accrued monthly	5 d / 6 mo	Vacation, Sick, Personal	142	Apr 14
Contractors	Employment-type	Unpaid	None	Vacation	14	Mar 21

Manage mode

Clicking Edit policies flips the page into Manage mode: a 2-pane layout with the policy / leave-type sidebar on the left and a per-policy editor on the right.

The sidebar has two accordion sections:

Policies: all PTO policies, each opens an editor with four subsections:
- Basics: name, description, scope (Global / Locations / Employment types), effective date.
- Accrual: accrual method (Annual lump, Monthly accrual, Per pay period), rate, max balance.
- Carryover: carryover allowance, expiration window, blackout periods.
- Approval: required approver chain (Manager / HR / Custom).
Leave types: all leave types available in your company:
- Built-in (13 types): Sparko-curated types (Vacation, Sick, Personal, Bereavement, Jury Duty, Parental, etc.) which can be hidden per company but not edited.
- Custom: leave types created by your HR Admin (e.g. "Acme Hack Week"), with the curated 24-icon picker for visual identity.

Each save creates an audit-log entry, recording who changed what and when, preserved for HR review.

Custom leave types

HR Admins can create custom leave types via the Leave types accordion. Pick a name + icon from the 24 curated icons (umbrella, palm tree, medkit, plane, baby, gavel, paw, books, mountain, heart, etc.) + optionally tie it to specific policies.

Known limitations: the employee request modal currently only offers the built-in leave types. A custom type you create here isn't yet selectable from an employee's own request form. Separately, the request modal's "Military" option currently has a mismatched internal code and will fail to submit ("No PTO policy found") until this is fixed. Avoid using it for now, and log the leave manually via HR if a military-leave request comes up.

Holiday Management (HR Admin)

Open Time & Leave > Holiday Management to manage which holidays your company observes.

Country holiday calendars

Sparko curates public-holiday data for US, UK, Canada, India, Singapore, Australia, and the UAE. To add one, click Subscribe to country, pick a country, review the preview of dates it will add, and apply. This creates a company-owned "{Country} (Auto-imported)" calendar populated with that year's holidays.

Once imported, the calendar is yours to tune: mark an individual holiday not observed (e.g. it falls outside your operating model), edit or delete a date, or Re-import to pull the latest curated dates (already-present dates are skipped, so your edits survive). Unsubscribe removes the whole country calendar.

Automatic: when you add an employee based in, or remote for, a supported country that your company doesn't have yet, that country's calendar is imported for you, so a new hire's region has its holidays from day one.

Next year's holidays: on 1 November Sparko adds next year's holidays to each country calendar where you have active employees. Holidays set by a rule, such as Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November or Good Friday, are worked out for that year. Holidays that depend on a lunar or religious calendar come from Sparko's curated dates; if those are not published yet, only the rule-based days are added, so check the calendar and add the rest when they are announced.

Country not in the curated list? Sparko can generate that country's public holidays for you. It follows the same approve-then-apply shape as the curated countries: you get a preview listing every date it produced, which ones are new and which already exist on your calendar, and nothing is written until you apply. Only the rows you saw are imported. Sparko does not re-generate at apply time, so the calendar can never contain a date you did not review.

Because the dates are generated rather than curated, check them before applying.

Custom company holidays

The left rail also lists your company's own holiday calendars (e.g. "Acme Company Days") for company-specific observances like founder's day, summer Friday, or an end-of-year shutdown. Every holiday row has an Observe / Not observed toggle plus edit and delete actions.

Upload holidays from a CSV

Have a year of company dates in a spreadsheet? Click Upload CSV in the page header.

Pick which of your custom calendars the dates go on.
Choose the file. Your columns must include date (formatted 2026-12-25) and name; you can also include is_observed, is_recurring and recurrence_rule. Up to 500 rows per file.
Sparko lists every row it read with a check result. Rows with a problem (missing date, missing name, a date that isn't a real calendar date) are called out by row number.
Fix any flagged rows and pick the file again. The import is all-or-nothing, so Import stays disabled until every row passes.
After importing you see the counts straight from the import: how many were added, how many were skipped because that date was already on the calendar, and how many rows were read.

Dates already on the calendar are skipped rather than duplicated, so re-uploading a corrected file is safe.

Employee view

Employees see their final, merged holiday calendar on their PTO dashboard: every observed holiday across their applicable calendars. They don't see observance overrides or which calendar a date came from, only their effective working calendar.

Timesheets

For hourly employees, the Time & Leave > Timesheet page tracks clock-in / clock-out + breaks.

Clock card

The top of the page is a clock card with:

A large Clock in / Clock out button.
Live elapsed-time display.
A break button (Start break / End break) that subtracts break minutes from the working total on clock-out.

Progress tiles

Four progress stat tiles below the clock summarize the week:

Hours worked
Hours scheduled
Overtime, with the rule it came from: "beyond 8h a day" for a long day, "beyond 40h a week" for a long week, or both
Hours remaining

Daily entries

Below the tiles is a per-day breakdown with clock-in, clock-out, break minutes, and total.

Days with nothing logged still get a row, so a gap in the week is visible rather than silently missing. The row says which kind of gap it is: a non-working day where no entry is expected, today before you have clocked in, or a working day with no entry at all.

Adding an entry for a day you forgot

Forgot to clock in? A working day with no entry carries an + Add entry button. Fill in the clock-in and clock-out, break minutes, and optionally the project and what you worked on. The total hours are worked out from the times you enter.

The same two checks as editing apply: clock-out must be after clock-in, and the entry cannot overlap another entry on the same day. The button is disabled once the timesheet has been submitted.

Fixing an entry

Got a time wrong? Open the entry and edit it. You can change:

Clock-in and clock-out
Break minutes
Project and what you worked on

The total hours recalculate from the new times, and the weekly total updates with them. Two checks apply: clock-out has to be after clock-in, and an entry can't overlap another entry on the same day. Entries on an approved timesheet can't be edited.

Approved timesheet hours, overtime, and PTO days are logged and reportable (see Manager Analytics below). Approved hours on client work sheets go into payroll runs on their own (see the Compensation guide). For other hours, hand the reports to whatever payroll process or provider you use.

Client work timesheets

If you work on a client assignment, or you look after people who do, Timesheet has a Client work tab. The tabs row carries the week picker (previous and next arrows), a Key button, Filter and a search box (Search worker or project).

The grid shows one week at a time, one line per assignment: the worker, the client and the site, then a cell for each day, the Week total and a Status badge. Hover a line to see the project, the role and, for a worker on two assignments, "Also on" the other one. Filter narrows by Status or Client.

Press Key to see what the cells mean:

Device taps (teal): hours from badge taps on a site device.
Manual (dashed purple): hours typed in by hand.
Edited (blue): a tap corrected by someone.
Open: a tap-in with no tap-out yet.

The Week column shows the hours against the project's weekly overtime threshold, with an overtime badge once it is passed. Taps that did not reach a sheet appear at the bottom of the grid with a button to resolve them.

When taps need a decision, a strip at the top says how many. Press Review all to open the Taps to resolve drawer. It has Waiting and Decided views, and each waiting tap has a Review button. The kinds are:

What you see	What happened	What you can do
Missed tap-out	A tap-in with no tap-out after 14 hours	Set the tap-out time, or ignore the tap
Missed tap-in	A tap-out with no tap-in before it	Set the tap-in time, or ignore
Double tap	Two taps the same way on one device within 2 minutes	Drop the duplicate. Sparko keeps the first tap
Unassigned site	A tap at a site where the worker has no assignment that day	Assign it to one of their assignments
Unmapped badge	A badge nobody owns yet	Map it to a person
Two open clock-ins	A tap-in at a second assignment while the first is open	Close the first one. Both clock-ins are allowed
Submitted sheet	A tap on a sheet already sent for approval	Ignore it, or reopen the sheet in Compensation

Every decision is logged. Under Decided in the drawer you can press Undo on one until the sheet is submitted. Taps a few seconds apart on one device are dropped automatically and listed there too.

Press a row to see the sheet with the source of every hour. Approver view shows exactly what your client sees. Open sheet takes you to the full sheet, where you add hours, import a sheet and press Submit for approval.

Your hours follow the client's period, not the calendar month. To change a day you typed in, edit its entry on My timesheet. Editing a device entry there marks it as edited.

You can be clocked in on two assignments at once. Each assignment keeps its own clock-in, so taps at two sites on one day land on the right sheet.

How your client approves your hours

When you submit, your approver gets an email. If your project's approver is the client's contact, they open the link, enter a code we email them, and approve or send back your hours with a note. If it is one of your supervisors, they approve in Sparko.

You get a notification when your hours are approved or sent back. If a link expires before your client acts, HR can press Resend link.

If you received an approval email

The email asks you to review a worker's hours for one period.

Press Review hours in the email.
Enter the code we sent to the same address.
Check the days and totals. No pay or rate is shown. Each day shows where the hours came from: a device tap with its times, an entry typed in by hand, or a tap the supplier corrected. Device and event ids and staff names stay on the supplier's side.
Press Approve and type your name, or press Reject, type your name and say what needs fixing.

The link works once and expires after 14 days. If it expired, ask the supplier for a new one.

Shift roster

Time & Leave → Roster plans who works which shift at each site. A site is a client project with workers assigned to it.

For managers and HR

The header shows the site, the client and when the roster was last published. Two icons switch the view: Workers view (a row per worker, a column per day, with each worker's hours against the 48-hour week) and Shifts view (each shift as a card with its cover). Beside them are Generate roster and the publish button.

The tabs row carries Roster, Swaps, Plan vs actual, Templates and Rate cards (if you can see rates), then the week picker, a coverage gap pill, Key, Filter and Search workers. The pill appears only when the week has gaps. Press Key to see the shift codes, leave, sick and public holiday markers, and the dots for edits waiting on Publish and replacements already sent.

Generate roster fills open days for this week, this month or up to 12 months ahead. It uses the site's shift templates, the patterns crews follow and the coverage rules. It never rosters someone on approved leave, never breaks the 11-hour rest between shifts or the 48-hour week, and keeps every shift already on the roster. A public holiday blocks everyone except workers who opted in; their shifts are paid at the site's holiday premium.
Cover rows under the grid show heads against the minimum for each shift and day. A red count is a gap, shown before the day comes. Press the coverage gap pill to list every gap for the week, each with a Fill button that opens the replacements.
Replacements. Select a gap or a sick worker's cell to see who can take the shift: the same trade only, people at the same site first, then other sites, then the shared pool. Each candidate shows rest hours, the week's hours and why anyone is not eligible. Assign and notify puts the replacement on the shift and tells them in Sparko straight away; it does not wait for Publish.
Publish. The button reads Publish n changes while edits wait, and All published (or Nothing to publish before the first publish) when none do. It speaks only to publishing: coverage gaps keep their own count beside the week. It sends one notice to each worker whose shifts changed since the last publish (added, edited, swapped or removed). Unpublished changes carry a dot on the grid.
Swaps. Workers ask to swap a shift with a colleague of the same trade. Sparko checks rest, the weekly cap and leave when they ask and again when you decide. You can't decide a swap you are part of. The Swaps tab lists your people's swaps on every site, with a Site filter to narrow it. A swap whose shift date has passed can only be declined.
Plan vs actual compares each shift that has started with the hours on the timesheet: on time, late, overtime, missed clock-out, hours at another site, sick, or no hours.
Templates holds the site's shifts (times, break, day or night, premium) with the coverage per weekday, and the patterns (for example 4 on, 4 off) with the crew on each.
Rate cards list bill and pay rates by trade, worker class and shift, with the shift premiums. Linking an assignment to a line sets its rate from the card; an assignment whose rate differs from its line is flagged as an override, here and on the assignment.

For workers

Roster shows your published shifts for the week. Select Request swap on a coming shift, pick a colleague, and add a note. The Swaps tab lists your requests; you can withdraw one while it waits.

Attendance devices (HR Admin)

Admin > People > Time & Leave Settings > Attendance devices connects your site's badge readers. The tab appears for people who can manage attendance devices.

The tab shows one line and one list:

The line says how many badges are not mapped and how many devices have no site. When something needs mapping, a to map pill sits at its start.
The list has a row per badge or device, with columns Badge or device, Belongs to, Project, Last activity and Status (Mapped or Not mapped / No site). Search it with the box on the tabs row. Select a row to open its drawer.

Set it up:

Open Advanced › Connector at the bottom of the tab. Press Generate secret and copy it. Sparko shows it once.
Point your device or its middleware at the POST endpoint shown, with the key in X-Sparko-Key-Id and each request signed with the secret in X-Sparko-Signature. A sample event is shown below the endpoint. The developer docs at https://api.sparko.app/v1/docs describe the format.
When taps arrive, map each new badge to a person and each new device to a site. Press the to map pill to open a drawer that lists every unmapped badge and device. Pick a person or a site and press Map. Taps that were held join the right timesheet once both are set. A site belongs to one client project; the person's assignment on that project picks the sheet.

To change a mapping later, select its row. A badge drawer lets you pick another person and Save, or Unmap. Unmapping sends taps on draft sheets back to the queue. Submitted sheets keep their hours. A device drawer has a Label and a Site, and lets you create a new site on a client project.

Rotate secret issues a new one. The old one keeps working for 24 hours so devices can switch over. A resent event is recognized by its event id and changes nothing. If you use ZKTeco, Suprema or another system, Ask for a connector at the bottom of the Connector section.

Approval Delegation (Manager)

Managers can delegate approval authority for a date range. This is useful when you're on leave yourself. Set a start/end date and scope the delegation to PTO only, timesheets only, or everything. Sparko can also auto-delegate for you: if your own PTO request is approved, your delegate is activated automatically for those dates.

Timesheet Rules: Work Week & Overtime (HR Admin)

Under Admin Settings > Time & Leave Settings the page has up to three tabs: Approvals, Timesheet rules and Attendance devices.

Approvals sets the default approval chain (Manager only, Manager → HR Admin, Manager → Skip-level, or Custom per policy) and Auto-approve requests up to (days), where 0 is off. Advanced holds Allow per-leave-type overrides (Growth plan).

Timesheet rules is a table with the columns Applies to, Work week, Overtime and Approval. The first row is the company-wide Default rule. Select a row to edit it in a drawer, where you set:

Work days: which days count as working days. The default is Monday to Friday. PTO requests only deduct working days, timesheet weeks anchor on your chosen start day, and utilization reports use your working days for expected hours.
Weekly overtime after (hrs) and Daily overtime after (hrs), and the Overtime enabled and Approval required switches.
Week starts on, under Details.

On the Growth plan, Add override creates a rule for a country, an employment type, or both. This is useful where local rules differ, for example a Sunday to Thursday work week for a Gulf office. The most specific matching rule wins per employee. Delete removes an override, and those employees fall back to the default.

Changes on the Approvals tab are saved with the save bar at the bottom of the page.

Manager Analytics

Five reports under Time & Leave > Reports (manager/HR Admin):

PTO liability: each employee's accrued, unused leave valued in money (accrued days × daily rate from salary).
Utilization: hours worked vs. available capacity, capacity already netting out approved PTO.
Absence trends: total and average PTO days per department over a date range, with a breakdown of the most common leave types taken.
Approval speed: average time between a request being submitted and decided, plus approval/rejection rates and how many requests are still pending.
Overtime summary: total overtime hours with an estimated cost.

Known limitation: the overtime summary's cost estimate uses a flat $45/hr rate for every employee regardless of their actual salary or country. Treat it as a rough order-of-magnitude figure, not an accurate cost, until it's tied to real pay data.

Approvals (Manager / HR Admin)

Managers see PTO requests from their direct reports under Time & Leave > Approvals (and also on the Approvals home page).

For each request, you can:

Approve: request becomes a confirmed booking; the employee's balance is deducted.
Reject: request is closed; balance is untouched. You can add a note explaining the rejection.
Suggest other dates. When rejecting because of timing rather than the request itself, propose a later window. Pick how far to move it and Sparko works out dates covering the same number of working days, skipping weekends and the holidays on that employee's calendar. The suggestion goes to them with your note. Only approvers on that request can use this.
View context: the request modal shows the requester's current balance, any overlapping team leave during the same window, and the impact on team coverage.

HR Admins see all company-wide pending requests with the same controls.

The to approve pill on the dashboard lists both leave requests and submitted timesheets awaiting you (see "Approving from the dashboard" above). Press Approve on a row to decide in place, or open the row in My Hub to see the detail first or reject with a reason.

Approvals across entities

A manager approves their own reports in every entity, whatever the company's privacy setting. Leave, timesheets and reviews of a report in another entity reach their manager as usual, and that entity's HR can act on them too.

Nobody decides their own request

You cannot approve or reject your own time off, whatever your role. That holds for the indirect case too: if an approver has delegated their authority to the person who filed the request, neither of them can sign it, so Sparko marks that step as skipped and passes the request to the next approver.

When a request is built, the requester is never placed in its own approval chain. If there is no manager, Sparko looks for an HR admin, then walks up the reporting line, then falls back to a Super Admin, and only picks someone who actually holds the approval permission.

If a company genuinely has nobody else who can approve, a one-person workspace for instance, the request is approved on submission rather than sitting pending forever. That is recorded in the audit log and flagged for review, so it is visible rather than silent.

AI summary for an approval decision

Where to find it: in the Approve request window, between the balance tiles and Schedule conflicts. Select Summarise to get it. Nothing runs until you do. Summarising the same request again the same day, with nothing changed, does not use another AI action.

The approval modal already shows days requested, balance before and after, notice given, who else on the team is out, and whether you're away too. The summary does not repeat any of that. It gets two sentences for what the tiles cannot show: how the facts interact, and which of the requester's goals fall due while they are out or in the first three working days after they are back.

It is built from the same data the tiles beside it show, so the sentence can never describe a different set of facts than the numbers on screen.

It does not recommend approving or denying. That is your call, and a model nudging one way on somebody's time off is not something anyone asked for.

If AI is unavailable, the modal falls back to a plain summary of the same facts rather than showing an error.

Requires AI to be enabled for Time & Leave in Admin Settings. When it is off, the window shows no summary section.

Reminders about goals due during leave

When leave is approved, the requester is notified if any of their goals fall due during it or in the first three working days after they return, with a link straight to each goal. The same reminder is sent once more in the three days before they go, so leave booked months ahead is flagged again when there is still time to hand it over. These are plain notifications, not AI, and they never repeat beyond those two sends.

Team leave patterns (Manager / HR Admin)

Where to find it: Analytics → Time & Leave → Patterns tab.

Absence patterns worth noticing across your own team, over the last six months by default.

This is rule-based, not AI. These are counts over dates, and a model asked to spot "unusual" absence patterns will invent one, and somebody's sick leave is the worst place in the product to be confidently wrong.

Four patterns, each shown as a pattern-level count (how many people show that shape) with a plain reading:

Repeated long weekends: single days taken on a Monday or Friday. Usually just a preference; worth noticing only alongside something else.
Frequent single-day sick absences: can point to a health issue or a workload one. A conversation, not a flag.
Repeatedly cancelled time off: someone giving up their own booked leave again and again is a burnout signal.
No leave taken at all: the strongest of the four. Rest that is never taken is not rest deferred.

The tab never lists people by name: it reports how widespread each shape is, not who shows it, so it cannot become a company-wide absence league table. The place to understand one person's leave is their own record, with context.

Not taking leave also feeds retention risk. Time since someone last took a non-sick day off is part of their flight-risk score. Sick days are excluded, because being ill is not rest, and people in their first few months are excluded, because "hasn't taken leave yet" just means "recently joined".

Permissions reference

Permission	What it grants
`time_leave.requests.submit`	Submit own PTO requests
`time_leave.requests.view_own`	See own requests on dashboard
`time_leave.requests.view_team`	See team's requests + full leave-type detail on Team Calendar
`time_leave.requests.view_all`	See all company PTO requests + full leave-type detail anywhere
`time_leave.requests.approve`	Approve / reject team requests
`time_leave.policies.view_all`	View PTO policies (overview table)
`time_leave.policies.edit`	Edit PTO policies
`time_leave.leave_types.manage`	Manage leave types
`time_leave.holidays.view`	View company holiday calendar
`time_leave.holidays.manage`	Subscribe to Sparko calendars + manage custom holidays
`time_leave.timesheets.submit`	Clock in / out + submit timesheets
`time_leave.timesheets.approve`	Approve direct reports' timesheets
`time_leave.roster.view_own`	See your own shifts on the Roster page
`time_leave.roster.swap_request`	Ask to swap one of your shifts
`time_leave.roster.view_team`	See your team's roster, cover and swaps
`time_leave.roster.view_all`	See every site's roster
`time_leave.roster.manage`	Generate, edit and fill shifts; set up templates, patterns and trades
`time_leave.roster.publish`	Publish the roster and send change notices
`time_leave.roster.swap_approve`	Approve or decline swaps you are not part of
`time_leave.rate_cards.view`	See rate cards
`time_leave.rate_cards.manage`	Create and edit rate cards and link assignments to them

System roles already include these by default. See your HR Admin if access is missing.

Related guides

People Module: employee directory, profiles
Performance Module: reviews, goals, and 1-on-1s
Admin: Roles and Permissions: assigning roles and permissions

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