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Right now Xero Payroll makes it extremely difficult to manage employee leave.

The problem:
• If I prohibit negative leave balances, staff can’t request leave unless they already have the hours accrued today - even if they’ll have plenty by the time the leave happens. This course isn't workable, because it does not match employee behaviour and would mean we can't plan leave in advance.
• If I allow negative balances, when employees add leave for a future date Xero just subtracts it from the balance as of today. That makes it confusing for employees to see whether they will have enough leave, and it forces me to do manual calculations every time someone requests time off.

Example:
An employee wants to take 2 weeks off in 3 months. They only have 3 days accrued now but will accrue another 10 before their trip. In any normal system, that should be fine. In Xero, I either block them completely (by disallowing negatives) or I have to spend 20 minutes making a spreadsheet to check whether their future accruals cover it.

Suggested fix:
• When someone requests leave, Xero should project their balance forward to the start of that leave
• The system should show both the current balance and the balance at the leave date.
• If the projected balance at the proposed leave date will be negative, then block it (or flag it, according to the settings)

This would solve an enormous amount of confusion and frustration around leave requests. I wonder whether others are feeling this friction also?

Many thanks, appreciate your work!