Absence Reasons
Define the categories used to explain employee absences — and whether those absences are paid or unpaid.
What Are Absence Reasons?
Absence Reasons are the named categories that appear in the dropdown when recording an absence on the Absent Days page. They allow you to classify why an employee was not clocked in on a working day — and to determine whether that day counts as paid or unpaid leave.
Examples of typical absence reasons:
- Annual Leave (paid)
- Sick Leave (paid, up to entitlement)
- Family Responsibility Leave (paid)
- Study Leave (paid)
- Unpaid Leave (unpaid)
- Unauthorised Absence (unpaid)
- Public Holiday (paid — typically handled automatically, but can be recorded here)
Paid vs Unpaid
The most important setting on each reason is whether it is Paid or Unpaid.
- Paid — the employee's salary is not reduced for this absence. For Monthly Fixed employees, the day is accounted for with no deduction.
- Unpaid — a pro-rata deduction is applied to the Monthly Fixed employee's salary for each day with this reason. Hourly, daily, and weekly employees are simply not paid for hours they did not work, so the "unpaid" flag has less effect for them — but it still appears on their absence records for HR reporting.
Adding a Reason
- Click Add Reason.
- Enter a Name that will appear in the dropdown and on payslip reports.
- Toggle Paid on or off.
- Click Save.
Editing a Reason
You can rename a reason or change its paid/unpaid status at any time. The change takes effect on new absence records and future payslips. Existing absence records are not retroactively updated — they stored the paid/unpaid flag at the time they were created. If you change a reason from paid to unpaid and need historical records to reflect that, you would need to re-enter the affected absences.
Deleting a Reason
The system uses a smart delete strategy to protect data integrity:
- Never used — the reason is permanently deleted from the database. It disappears entirely.
- In use on one or more absence records — the reason is deactivated rather than deleted. It is hidden from all dropdowns and will never appear again, but the historical absence records that reference it remain intact and readable.
A deactivated reason cannot be reactivated. If you deactivate a reason that was in use, those historical records still show the original reason name. The reason is simply retired — it can no longer be chosen for new absences.
Keep your reasons list lean. A short, consistent list makes HR reports easier to read and reduces the chance of different administrators categorising the same type of absence differently. Merge similar reasons when you can before they accumulate too much history.
Default Reasons
The system is installed with a default set of absence reasons aligned with South African BCEA categories. You can rename or delete these to match your company's terminology. You cannot reduce the total to zero — at least one reason must exist for the absence recording workflow to function.