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Leave and holidays
Run time-off and keep the firm calendar accurate, so the schedule's capacity line dips exactly when people are actually away.
What you'll achieve
Request and approve leave, then add a custom firm-wide closure, so approved time off and closures lower people's available hours on the schedule.
You'll end up with: A maintained leave and holiday calendar where approved leave and closures reduce capacity, and the swimlanes reflect who's really available.
Before you start
Time off isn't only an HR record in Monument, it bends the numbers you plan against. A person's available hours are their work pattern minus public holidays, custom closures, and approved leave, and those available hours are the capacity line the schedule draws in the resource swimlanes. Keep leave and holidays accurate and the schedule stops lying to you about who's free.
Leave and holidays live on two separate pages under Resources. Leave is where requests get submitted and approved; Holidays is where the firm's public dates and custom closures are managed. We'll run a request through Leave for Sarah Chen at Northlight Architects, then add a custom closure on Holidays.
Balances come from entitlements, not a self-serve setting
A leave entitlement gives someone a balance for a leave type and year, but Monument does not currently block a request when no entitlement exists. There's no self-serve screen where you set your own entitlement, an administrator manages that. When one exists, the balance card shows entitled hours, hours remaining, and hours currently pending, all sourced from that entitlement. Leave can still be requested and approved without one, so don't wait on an entitlement to get started; ask an administrator to configure it so the balance card and approval decision have the right context.
Sarah's Annual Leave balance for the year starts at 152.0 out of 152.0 hours. Submit an 8-hour request and the card shows 8.0h pending, still against the full 152.0. Only once that request is approved does the balance actually move, down to 144.0 out of 152.0.
A new leave request is saved as pending when approval is required, or approved immediately when it is not. A pending request can then be approved, rejected, or cancelled. Pending hours show on the balance card so you can see what's been asked for, but they don't reduce it. Approval is the one action that actually spends the balance, and it's also what drops that week's capacity line on the schedule; any allocation sitting on those days can tip into the red. See balance capacity in the swimlanes.
Request and approve leave
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On the Leave page, check the Annual Leave balance card before requesting anything: it reads 152.0 out of 152.0 hours.
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Click Request Leave. The form defaults to Annual Leave with a one-day range starting today, so there's nothing to change.
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Click Submit Request. The request appears as Pending in My Leave Requests, and lands in Pending Approvals for whoever signs off.
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Approve the request. Its status updates from Pending to Approved, it moves out of Pending Approvals, and the balance drops to 144.0 out of 152.0 hours.
Sarah Chen is Northlight Architects' organisation owner in this walkthrough, so she both submits and approves her own request. On a bigger team, the approver is usually someone else, a manager reviewing requests for the people they oversee, not the requester themselves.
A leave type can be configured not to require approval. When it doesn't, the request is accepted straight away with no approver step. Annual Leave, used here, always waits for a decision before it counts against the balance.
Generate public holidays from the organisation's location
Public holidays and custom closures live on the separate Holidays page, reached from the Holidays tab. The organisation is already set to Australia, and Sync Public Holidays is what actually turns that location into a year of dates on the calendar.
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Click the Holidays tab to open the Holidays page.
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Click Sync Public Holidays. Monument generates a full year of Australian dates, New Year's Day among them, straight from the organisation's location.
Sync Public Holidays reads the country from the organisation's location in settings. If the button isn't doing anything, that location isn't set yet, add it in settings, then sync again from here.
Add a custom, firm-wide holiday
A custom holiday is anything outside that public-holiday calendar, an office retreat, a shutdown week, a local event, and it reduces capacity firm-wide the same way an approved leave request does.
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Click Add Custom Holiday to open a closure of your own.
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Enter Studio Retreat in Holiday Name and set its date.
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Leave Applies to everyone switched on, since a studio retreat closes the whole firm, not just one team.
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Click Add Holiday. Studio Retreat joins the list as a Custom row, alongside the public holidays already synced.
Applies to everyone is on by default, but it can be turned off and scoped to specific pools through the visibility filters instead. That's the tool for a closure that only affects one studio or team, not the whole firm.
Troubleshooting
- A balance looks wrong or missing. There's no self-serve way to set or edit your own entitlement. If the number looks off, or there isn't one, that's an administrator task, not a setting on the Leave page.
- Capacity didn't drop after a request went in. It's still pending. Only an approved request lowers the balance and the capacity line, submitting alone doesn't.
- A closure only some people can see. It's scoped to pools through the visibility filters. Switch it to Applies to everyone, or fix which pools the filter includes.
- Sync Public Holidays isn't available. Your organisation has no country set. Add it in settings, then sync from the Holidays page.
- A healthy schedule suddenly shows red. Someone's leave was just approved, or a holiday landed, shrinking that week's capacity. The work didn't grow, the line dropped. Rebalance against it.
Where this fits next
Your calendar now drives availability accurately. To see and act on it:
- Read and rebalance the capacity it produces: balance capacity in the swimlanes.
- Make sure each person's baseline week is right in the first place: set up your team.