Holidays, sick leave and absence
A time tracker that only records the days you worked cannot tell you anything useful about a month. The empty squares have to mean something, and there are at least five different things they can mean.
Why empty is not good enough
Consider a month with 16 working entries. Is that a light month, a month with a week of annual leave in it, a month where you were off sick, or a month with four days you forgot to record? The totals look identical. Only the reason distinguishes them, and the reason is exactly what disappears if non-working days are left blank.
This matters in three concrete ways. It makes gaps detectable — a blank Tuesday is either a missed entry or an unrecorded absence, and if every real absence is recorded, every blank is an error. It makes monthly totals interpretable. And it gives you a running count of leave taken, which is otherwise held only by your employer.
The categories worth separating
| Type | Usually | Why track it separately |
|---|---|---|
| Annual leave | Paid, deducted from an entitlement | You need your own count of days taken and days remaining |
| Public holiday | Paid, not deducted from entitlement | Treated differently from annual leave in nearly every scheme |
| Sick leave | Paid at a possibly different rate, with its own rules | Often has waiting days, caps, and separate reporting requirements |
| Unpaid absence | Not paid | Explains a lower payslip without implying an error |
| Time off in lieu | Paid from banked hours | Draws down a balance you earned — see the hour bank guide |
Working Hours 4b distinguishes holidays and work absences as separate event types, with travel days and free-text notes alongside them. The exact labels matter less than the habit of not letting different things share a category.
Part days
Half-day leave, a medical appointment in the middle of a shift, leaving two hours early for a family reason — these are the entries people skip, and they are the ones that make monthly totals drift.
A day can hold both a working event and an absence. Record the hours you worked as a working event and the rest as the appropriate absence type. The day then sums correctly and the reason for the short day is preserved. If you instead record only the worked hours, the day looks like an unexplained short shift, which is precisely the thing you would be trying to investigate three months later.
Sickness during booked leave. In several jurisdictions, falling ill during annual leave allows the affected days to be reclassified as sick leave and the annual leave to be reclaimed. Whether this applies to you depends on local law and your employer's policy — but you cannot make the claim at all without a record of which days were which.
Public holidays are messier than they look
Three complications come up regularly:
- Public holidays falling on a non-working day. Some schemes grant a substitute day, some do not. Record what you were actually granted.
- Working on a public holiday. This usually attracts a premium rate, and sometimes a day off in lieu as well. It is a working day and a holiday, and both facts need recording.
- Regional holidays. If you work across regions or for a company headquartered elsewhere, the applicable calendar may not be the local one.
Keeping your own leave balance
Most employers track annual leave in an HR system, and most of those systems are correct. The reason to keep a parallel count is not distrust — it is that leave disputes are almost always about a specific day, months after the fact, and a personal record with dates settles them in seconds.
The minimum useful version: your annual entitlement written down somewhere, every day of leave recorded on the calendar as it is taken, and a subtraction once a quarter. That is enough to notice a discrepancy while it is still small enough to fix easily.
The same applies to carry-over. Rules on carrying unused leave into the next year vary — some allow it freely, some cap it, some require it to be used by a deadline. If yours allows carry-over, the balance at year end is a number you want to have computed yourself before someone else computes it for you.
Sick leave and evidence
Sick leave usually comes with process attached: notifying your employer within a certain window, self-certifying up to a number of days, medical certification beyond that. The details are jurisdiction-specific and often contract-specific.
What is worth recording regardless: the dates, whether you notified and when, and whether a certificate was provided. If you photograph certificates, attach them to the day — Working Hours 4b's paid tiers allow images on events, which is a reasonable place for them since the image ends up filed against the exact date it refers to rather than in a camera roll.
What this changes about your monthly total
Once absences are recorded, a month stops being a single number and becomes a small statement: hours worked, hours of paid leave, hours of unpaid absence, days sick. That is the form in which it can be compared against a payslip, because that is the form the payslip takes.
It is also the form in which patterns show up. Three years of records showing that you take almost no annual leave in the first half of the year and then scramble to use it in December is a fact about how you work. So is a cluster of sick days that always follows a run of night shifts. Neither is visible in a total.