Open anyone from All Employees and pick the Leave Balance tab. One card per leave type, with the whole year on it.
The four numbers
Quota is the annual allowance for that leave type — 21 days of annual leave, 14 of sick. It comes from the request type and is the same for everybody unless it has been changed for an individual.
Used is days on approved requests. Spent.
Pending is days on requests that have been submitted but not decided. Not spent, but not free either — BeeHR holds them so two overlapping requests can’t both be approved against the same days.
Left is what’s actually bookable: quota − used − pending. That’s the big number in the ring, and the one to quote when somebody asks how much leave they have.
In the screenshot: 21 quota, 5 used, 4 pending, so 12 left.
The number that catches people out
There is a second, subtly different figure you’ll meet elsewhere — quota minus used, ignoring pending. For the same employee that would be 16, not 12.
Both are true and they answer different questions:
- 12 — how many more days can they book right now?
- 16 — how many days of allowance have they not yet consumed?
The Balance tab and the balance report both show the first, because it’s the one that prevents over-booking. If a request gets rejected, its days move out of pending and the ring goes up without anybody having taken leave. That is expected, not a bug.
The bar underneath
The progress bar splits the same story into segments: blue for used, amber for pending, the rest empty. A card showing a lot of amber is somebody with a stack of undecided requests — usually a sign their approver has a queue to work through rather than anything about the employee.
Types without a quota
Unpaid Leave and Work From Home have no quota, so they get no card. There is nothing to run out of, and a ring counting down from nothing would be meaningless.
They still count workdays and still need approval — they just don’t consume an allowance.
Balances are per person, per type, per year
Three separations worth being explicit about:
- Using all your sick leave has no effect on your annual leave. Types don’t borrow from each other.
- Quota is what each employee gets, not a company pool to divide.
- Balances are calendar-year figures and start fresh in January. Nothing carries over, and there’s no accrual schedule that drips days in monthly — the full allowance is available from the first day of the year.
That last point matters for new joiners: somebody starting in October has the same annual quota on the books as somebody who has been there since January. If you pro-rate leave for part-years, that is an adjustment you make, not something BeeHR works out.
Changing somebody’s allowance
Editing the quota on the request type changes the default for everyone. There is no per-person quota field on this tab — the cards report the balance, they don’t set it.
For a whole-company view of the same numbers, and a CSV of them, see The Company-Wide Leave Balance Report.