What is time off?
Time off in Operating is how leave — holidays, vacation, sick days, and other absence — is planned for your people. It removes a person's availability so that capacity, cost, and revenue all reflect when someone isn't working.
Written By Lauri Eurén
Last updated 1 day ago
The Time off project
Every organization has one built-in Time off Project. All leave is planned against it rather than scattered across normal Projects. You can manage time off directly in Operating, or import it automatically from your HRIS so the two systems stay in sync — useful when HR already owns the source of truth for leave.
Full-day vs. partial time off
The two behave differently where they meet planned work:
Full-day time off removes the whole day's availability. If a Person is allocated to a Project that day, Operating ignores the overlapping work — they can't deliver it while away.
Partial time off reduces availability proportionally but does not ignore overlapping work. Someone 50% off for a week who also has 100% of project work planned reads as 150% booked — an overbooking signal to look at and resolve, not a number Operating silently absorbs.
How time off differs from public holidays
Time off is leave planned per Person. Public holidays are different: they come from the holiday calendars (Holiday calendars (public holidays)) you assign and reduce everyone's day by the holiday's percentage automatically. Both lower available hours, but one is individual and one is calendar-wide.
What time off affects
Because it removes availability, time off lowers a Person's capacity (What is capacity and how is it calculated?) for the period, and it reduces planned cost — and, on time-and-materials work, planned revenue — across the days they're away, without anyone editing the Allocation. It also feeds a Person's time balance (Time balance (flex)).
Merging time off from another platform
If you’re exporting time off time entries from another time tracking platform like Harvest time tracking, you can merge the external time off project to the time off project in Operating. See How to merge Time Off projects .