Two different things
Attendance is who was at work and when. Check-in and check-out times.
Time Off is planned absence — annual leave, sick leave, unpaid leave.
They are separate apps and they solve separate problems. Most companies need Time Off. Fewer genuinely need Attendance.
This article covers both, starting with the one that pays for itself first.
Time Off
For most companies this is the HR app that earns its place immediately.
Why it works
Most leave friction comes from disagreement about the number. How many days does she have left? Was that day unpaid or annual? Did last year’s balance carry over?
When everyone can see their own balance, the argument disappears. That is the whole value, and it is worth more than the time saved on approvals.
Leave types
Set up the types that apply where you operate — annual, sick, unpaid, parental, compassionate, and any statutory categories.
Each type has its own rules on:
- How much is allocated
- Whether it needs approval and from whom
- Whether a document is required, such as a medical certificate
- Whether it is paid
Allocation
How leave is granted. Three approaches:
Fixed per year. Everyone gets a set number of days at the start of the year.
Accrual. Days build up monthly or per period worked. Common where entitlement depends on service.
Manual. Assigned individually. Useful for one-off grants.
The rules to agree first
Write these down before configuring anything, because they cause arguments twelve months later when they are hardest to fix.
Carry-over. What happens to unused leave at year end? All of it carries? A capped amount? Nothing? By what date must carried leave be used?
Accrual timing. Does leave accrue at the start or end of a period?
Negative balances. Can somebody take leave they have not accrued yet?
Part-time. How is entitlement calculated for people not working full weeks?
This is the section people skip, and it is the section that generates the complaints.
FIGURE 1: THE RULES TO AGREE BEFORE YOU CONFIGURE
Carry-over
- What happens to unused days at year end, and by when they must be used.
Accrual timing
- Start or end of the period. Affects everyone’s balance on day one.
Negative balances
- Can somebody take leave they have not earned yet?
Part-time calculation
- How entitlement works for people not on full weeks.
Work schedules and holidays
Two settings that quietly affect every leave calculation.
Work schedules. Each employee has working hours — days, times, breaks. Leave is calculated against this. An employee on the wrong schedule will have their leave calculated wrongly, and nobody notices until the balance looks odd.
Public holidays. Enter these per country. Employees in different locations need different calendars, and a missing public holiday means somebody’s leave is deducted for a day the office was closed.
Check both during setup. They are quick to get right and awkward to correct later.
Requesting and approving
An employee requests leave. Odoo checks their balance, routes it to their manager, and updates the calendar when approved.
The manager on the employee record is who gets it. So the org structure is not decoration — get the reporting lines right and approvals route themselves.
The team calendar shows who is off when. Useful for planning, and it stops three people booking the same week.
Attendance
The other app, and it needs more thought about whether you want it.
How it works
Employees check in and out. Odoo records the times and calculates hours worked.
Methods:
Kiosk mode. A shared tablet at the entrance. People check in with a PIN or a badge.
From their own device. Check in from their computer or phone.
Barcode or RFID. Scanning a badge.
When it is worth it
You pay by hours worked. Then you need an accurate record.
Shift work. Where knowing who is on site matters.
Compliance. Some jurisdictions require working-time records.
Site access. Where you need to know who is in the building.
When it is not
Salaried professional staff. Recording that a designer arrived at 9:02 achieves nothing and it signals distrust.
Remote and flexible teams. Check-in times measure presence, not work.
Small teams. Everyone knows who is in.
Be honest about which you are. Attendance tracking introduced without a clear purpose damages trust for no operational benefit, and people notice quickly.
FIGURE 2: DOES YOUR BUSINESS NEED ATTENDANCE TRACKING?
Yes, when
- You pay by hours worked
- You run shifts and need to know who is on site
- A regulation requires the record
- Site access needs controlling
Probably not, when
- Salaried professional staff
- Remote or flexible working
- A small team where everyone knows
- There is no stated purpose beyond monitoring
Attendance and timesheets are different
A distinction worth being clear about, because they get confused.
Attendance = you were at work for eight hours.
Timesheets = what those eight hours were spent on.
A services business billing customers needs timesheets. A factory paying by shift needs attendance. Some need both, and they answer different questions.
Reports
Leave balances. Who has what remaining. The report your team will look at most.
Leave calendar. Who is off when.
Absence patterns. Frequent short absences, or absences clustering on particular days. Handle this carefully — a pattern is a prompt for a conversation, not a conclusion.
Attendance summary. Hours per person per period, if you use it.
Public holiday impact. How many working days a period actually contains.
What goes wrong
Carry-over rules never agreed. The most common source of complaints, and it surfaces a year after go-live.
Wrong work schedules. Leave calculated against hours the person does not work.
Missing public holidays. Days deducted for a closed office.
Managers not set on employee records. Requests going nowhere.
Attendance introduced without explaining why. Reads as surveillance, and the goodwill cost exceeds any benefit.
FIGURE 3: SETTING UP TIME OFF
Agree the rules
- Carry-over, accrual, part-time — in writing
Set work schedules
- Leave is calculated against these
Enter public holidays
- Per country and location
Configure leave types
- Allocation, approval, documents
Getting started
- Agree carry-over and accrual rules in writing, with whoever decides policy
- Complete employee records — managers, departments, work schedules
- Enter public holidays for every location
- Configure leave types with their allocation rules
- Run a test — request, approve, check the balance moves correctly
- Tell the team how to check their own balance
- Only then consider Attendance, and only if you can state why
Point 6 matters more than it sounds. The value is people seeing their own balance. If nobody knows how, you have automated the approval and kept the argument.
The short version
Time Off pays for itself quickly, and the value is transparency — people checking their own balance instead of asking.
Agree the carry-over rules before configuring anything. That single decision causes more complaints than everything else combined.
Attendance is a different question. Useful where you pay by hours or run shifts. Damaging where introduced without a clear reason.
Leave balances causing arguments?
Get in touch. We start with your carry-over and accrual rules, because that is where the disputes come from — not from the software.
