Under the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (BCEA), annual leave depends on an employee’s working pattern:
12 days per year (four-day week)
15 days per year (five-day week)
18 days per year (six-day week)
Employees accrue leave monthly, and they can carry unused leave for up to six months. BCEA requires you to track carryover and use it before applying for new annual leave.
To help you stay compliant, Sage HR now includes predefined annual leave policies and a new policy sequence feature to manage carryovers.
📎NOTE: This functionality is only available for customers in South Africa
Sage HR provides predefined BCEA policies as a starting point. However, we don't maintain or update these policies if legislation changes. It’s your responsibility to review and update policies to remain compliant.
Create a statutory leave policy
Create a statutory leave policy
Go to Settings > Time off > Policies.
Click + New time off policy.
Complete the details:
Policy name: for example, Statutory leave
Allowance
Accrual
Reset date
Working days
Configure carryover
Configure carryover
In the Unused time section, you’ll now see three options:
Don’t carry over
Carry over a set number of days and expire after X months
Carry over to another policy (new) ✅
Select Carry over to another policy.
Enter the maximum number of days to carry over and set expiry (for example, six months).
If you select Carry over to another policy, Sage HR automatically applies conditions to ensure employees use their balances in the correct order:
Don't allow to book more days than remain in the current period: preselected and locked.
Require another policy to be fully used before time off from this policy can be requested: preselected and locked.
The system links your new child policy to the parent policy. Employees must first use their carryover balance from the child policy before drawing from the main allowance.
These settings are read‑only, so you can't change or remove them.
To continue, click Save.
Deleting or editing policies
Deleting or editing policies
Deleting a parent policy also deletes its child (carryover) policy and all related time off requests.
Carryover settings are permanent - once set, you can’t switch them off or edit the preselected conditions.
Reports and tracking
Reports and tracking
Time off ledger records all carryover activity:
Transfers into a carryover policy
Days used from a carryover policy
Days expired from a carryover policy
Time off status report:
Run by policy: shows allowance (parent) or carryover (child).
Run by employee: shows all linked policies together.
Messages in reports will guide you to select the right policy for the information you need.
Employees can also check their Time off summary to see carryovers and expiry dates.