Leave & Holidays

Leave and holidays decide who is paid for which day. GigRoot keeps them in one place: the days your office works, the holidays it observes, and the leave each person is entitled to — so leave counts, the calendar and payroll always agree.

• Work week — pick your weekly offs once; leave counts, payroll and the calendar all follow it.
• Official holiday lists — the Central Government and every state and UT, ticked or unticked in one checklist.
• Leave policies — as many as you need, starting from Indian templates, each person on one.
• Restricted holidays — employees take an optional holiday off against a small yearly quota.
• Balances everywhere — shown while applying, in Reports → Leaves, and applied in payroll.

Everything is set up in Settings → Leave policies & holidays, under People & HR. The owner, managers and HR can open it. It has three parts: Work week, Holidays and Leave policies.

Choose which days are weekly offs — Sunday only, Saturday and Sunday, or any other pattern. The work week is used everywhere a day has to be classed as working or not: how many days a leave takes, which days payroll pays as weekly offs, and which days the calendar shows as weekends.

A holiday on the calendar has one of three types:

• Public — the office is closed. A paid day for everyone, and never charged as leave.
• Optional — a restricted holiday. The office is open, but employees may take the day off as a Restricted Holiday leave.
• Company — your own day off, such as a founders' day or an annual offsite.

Instead of typing the year's holidays in, review them from the official lists:

1. 1
   Open Review holidays

   In Calendar → Holidays choose Review holidays (the Holidays part of Settings → Leave policies & holidays opens the same checklist and shows how many holidays the year has).
2. 2
   Pick the year and the list

   Choose All India (Central Government) or your state or union territory. The central list has the 17 gazetted holidays ticked and the restricted holidays — Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Onam, Raksha Bandhan, Ganesh Chaturthi, Chhath, Karwa Chauth and the rest — unticked. A state list has that state's public holidays ticked, plus the central restricted list unticked.
3. 3
   Tick and untick

   Tick a holiday to add it to the calendar and untick one to remove it, then choose Save holidays. The checklist opens on what your calendar already has, so reviewing a list again is harmless, and a holiday you added yourself is never removed by it.

When a year has no holidays loaded, the calendar prompts owners and managers to set them up. A single holiday can still be added by hand, with a date, type, description and colour, and a recurring one repeats every year.

An agency can have several leave policies — one for confirmed staff, one for people on probation, one for interns, and so on. Each policy lists the leave types, and for every type you set:

• On or off — a type that is off is not offered under that policy.
• Paid — whether the day is paid or Loss of Pay.
• Days per year — the yearly quota.
• Credited yearly or monthly — all at once at the start of the year, or a twelfth each month.
• Carry-forward cap — how many unused days roll into next year.

The types are Casual, Sick, Earned (Privilege), Comp Off, Unpaid (LOP), Maternity, Paternity, Bereavement, Restricted Holiday and Other. A policy can also switch on the sandwich rule: weekly offs and holidays that fall between leave days of one request are counted as leave too, so Friday and Monday off is four days. Days at either end of the request are never added.

Start a policy from a built-in template, then edit it to suit you:

• India Standard (Shops & Establishments) — the default. 12 casual and 12 sick days, 15 earned days credited monthly and carried forward up to 30, 26 weeks' maternity, 5 days' paternity, 3 days' bereavement and 2 restricted holidays.
• Factories Act — earned leave of 12 days a year, credited monthly (about one day for every 20 worked) and carried forward up to 30, with 7 casual and 7 sick days.
• IT / Startup — 10 casual and 12 sick days, 18 earned days carried forward up to 45, 10 days' paternity and 5 days' bereavement.
• Probation — 6 casual days credited monthly, 6 sick days, no earned leave until confirmation, and the sandwich rule on.
• Interns & Trainees — one paid day off a month, with no carry-forward.

One policy is marked the default. New employees get it unless you choose another.

A person's policy can be set in three places:

• While inviting or onboarding — People → Invite → Employment details → Leave policy.
• Later, one person at a time — in Edit contact.
• In bulk — Assign people on the policy's card.

Balances, approvals and payroll all follow the person's own policy, so moving someone from Probation to India Standard on confirmation changes their entitlement from then on.

Restricted Holiday is a leave type for taking an optional holiday off. It can only be used on a date marked Optional on the calendar, and each person has a quota set by their policy — two a year by default, as the Central Government allows. Everyone else works as normal that day.

In Apply for Leave, choosing Restricted Holiday replaces the dates with a list of the upcoming optional holidays, so the day is picked rather than typed.

A leave request needs both an HR and a manager approval; with no HR person in the agency, the manager's approval is enough. When someone applies, the owner, HR and their manager (or the agency's managers, if they report to nobody) get a notification that opens the request. The person who applied is notified when it is approved or rejected, with the reason. The owner's own leave is approved automatically.

• While applying — employees see their own balance in Apply for Leave, with the paid part and any Loss of Pay previewed before they send.
• Reports → Leaves — each person's paid leave left, per type and in total, with a CSV export.
• Adjustments — Settings → Attendance keeps per-person adjustments, such as an opening balance for someone joining from another system.
• Payroll — paid leave beyond the balance becomes Loss of Pay automatically; holidays and weekly offs are paid days.