09 · Absence & Time Tracking

This module covers two related but distinct Workday modules: Absence Management (time off, leave balances) and Time Tracking (recording hours worked), and how both feed into payroll processing (Level 3 Module 4).

Absence plans and accrual

An Absence Plan defines one type of time off (Vacation, Sick, Personal) and the rules governing how a worker earns and uses it:

Concept	Detail
Accrual rule	How balance builds over time (e.g., X hours accrued per pay period)
Accrual cap	Maximum balance a worker can hold before further accrual stops
Carryover rule	How much unused balance rolls into the next year, if any
Eligibility	Which worker population this plan applies to (often FTE- or country-based, same eligibility-rule mechanism as Module 4's benefits)

Absence plans are frequently country-specific — legally mandated sick leave minimums, for example, vary widely by jurisdiction, so a global tenant maintains multiple plan variants gated by the worker's country, using the same condition-rule pattern from Module 1.

Time off requests as a business process

Requesting time off runs through its own BP type (again, Module 1's engine): a worker submits a request, it's checked against their current accrued balance, and — depending on configuration — routes to a manager for approval or auto-approves if within policy. A request that would take the balance negative is either blocked or flagged for exception approval, depending on the plan's configured rules.

Time tracking: entering and validating worked hours

Time Tracking captures actual hours worked, primarily for non-exempt/hourly workers whose pay depends on hours rather than a fixed salary:

Concept	Detail
Time entry	Manual entry, a time clock, or a calculated schedule-based default
Time calculation tags	Rules that classify entered time into pay-relevant categories (regular, overtime, night differential)
Time block	A single recorded segment (e.g., 9am–1pm) that time calculation processes
Approval	Manager review/approval before hours are released to payroll

Time calculation tags are what let the same raw clock-in/clock-out data produce correctly categorized regular vs. overtime hours without a human manually splitting the entry — a worker who clocks 10 hours in a day in a jurisdiction with daily overtime rules gets 8 regular + 2 overtime hours calculated automatically from the same entered time block.

How absence and time tracking connect to payroll

Both modules exist largely to feed accurate inputs to payroll (Level 3 Module 4 covers payroll processing itself): approved time-off balances determine whether a pay period includes paid or unpaid leave, and approved time blocks with their calculated tags determine regular/overtime pay calculations. Getting the approval and calculation steps right before a payroll run is what Level 3's payroll module will assume is already in place.

Worked example: overtime and a sick day at Meridian's DC

A Distribution Center West warehouse associate at Meridian:

1. Clocks in/out across a week using Time Tracking, including one day with a 10-hour shift due to a rush order.
2. Time calculation tags apply automatically — the local jurisdiction's daily-overtime rule (over 8 hours/day = overtime) splits that 10-hour block into 8 regular + 2 overtime hours without manual intervention.
3. Requests a sick day later that week via Absence Management — the request checks against their accrued sick balance (built up via the DC's accrual rule), and — being within policy and balance — auto-approves without manager intervention, per the DC's configured plan.
4. Payroll input — at period close, the worker's pay calculation pulls both the calculated regular/overtime hours from Time Tracking and the approved paid sick hours from Absence Management as separate, already- resolved inputs.

How It Actually Works

Both modules produce the same shape of output for payroll: discrete, approved, dated records that a payroll run reads as inputs rather than recalculates from scratch — keeping the "what happened" (attendance, absence) separate from the "how it's paid" (payroll's own rules).

Time calculation tags apply rule logic to raw time blocks at the moment they're processed, not at data-entry time — so a policy change can recalculate historical, unprocessed blocks correctly. When the warehouse associate clocks a 10-hour day, the raw entry stored is simply "9am–7pm" (or similar); the split into 8 regular + 2 overtime hours is produced by evaluating the jurisdiction's overtime calculation rule against that raw block, generally at a scheduled calculation step rather than instantly at clock-out. This separation is why correcting an overtime rule's threshold and reprocessing time already entered (but not yet paid) retroactively recalculates the correct split, without needing every affected time block re-entered by hand.

Absence balances are a running total derived from accrual events and usage events, not a single number a request decrements directly. A sick-day request doesn't subtract from one stored "current balance" field; it's checked against a calculated balance (sum of all accrual records to date, minus sum of all approved usage records to date), the same additive, effective-dated pattern from Level 1 Module 5 applied to leave balance instead of staffing. This is why an accrual-cap change or a correction to a past accrual record correctly ripples forward into every later balance calculation without a manual balance recalculation step — the "current balance" was never stored, only computed.

Both time tracking and absence route through the standard BP engine for their approval steps, meaning the same eligibility and condition-rule concepts from earlier modules govern auto-approval versus manager review here too. The sick-day auto-approval above isn't a special "absence system" behavior — it's a condition rule (requested amount ≤ available calculated balance) attached to the Time Off Request BP's approval step, evaluated exactly the way Module 1's compensation-approval condition rule was, just on absence-specific fields.

Cheat sheet

Term	One-line definition
Accrual rule	How an absence balance builds over time
Time calculation tag	Rule classifying raw time blocks into regular/overtime/etc.
Time block	A single recorded segment of worked time
Calculated balance	A leave balance derived from accrual and usage records, not stored directly

Exercise

Design an absence plan eligibility rule (plain language) for a new "Volunteer Day" paid time-off plan at Meridian that should apply only to full-time corporate workers with at least one year of tenure. Then explain why this plan's balance calculation, once built, would automatically handle a worker crossing the one-year tenure mark mid-year without any manual balance adjustment — referencing the calculated-balance mechanism above.