Vacation, sick leave, unpaid leave, parental days, conference travel — every organization slices time off differently. In Collabin, leave types are fully customizable: their names, calendar colors, ordering, and how they behave in tracking. This guide shows how to model your real policy, and how to retire a type safely once it's been used.
Where to find them
Open General settings → Vacation Types in the dashboard. Managing leave types is an Admin-only capability — leaders and HR Managers consume types, admins define them. Every change is recorded in the audit log.
Anatomy of a leave type
Each type has a handful of settings, and they're worth choosing deliberately:
- Name — must be unique within your organization. Short, employee-facing names work best ("Vacation", "Home office", "Conference"), since this is what people pick when requesting.
- Color — a hex color used wherever the type appears visually: the in-app calendar, statistics. The default is Collabin blue (
#3B82F6); give each type a distinct color so a glance at the team calendar tells the story. - Sort order — controls the position of the type in lists and pickers. Put the most-used type first; nobody should scroll to find "Vacation".
- Sick flag — marks the type as sick leave.
- Unpaid flag — marks the type as unpaid, so it is treated separately in reporting and statistics rather than mixed in with paid time off.
- Active flag — inactive types can't be picked for new requests but keep their history. This is the retirement mechanism (more below).
The flags also surface in the REST API as is_sick, is_unpaid, and is_active on GET /v1/leave-types, so external reports can apply the same distinctions.
System types vs. your own
A fresh organization comes with system types — the basics every company needs. These are marked with a System badge and cannot be deleted, only renamed, recolored, or deactivated. Everything you create yourself is a regular type and fully yours.
How types interact with balances and counting
Two details people often miss:
- Allowances are per type, per year. Each member's balance is tracked separately for each leave type, including any carried-over days. Creating a "Conference" type therefore doesn't eat into anyone's vacation allowance — they're separate buckets.
- Days are counted on workdays only. When a request spans a weekend or a public holiday, those days don't count against the balance. This follows your organization's Workdays setting and the Holidays calendar (both also under General settings) — so a Friday-to-Monday request costs two days, not four.
Retiring a type the right way
Sooner or later a policy changes and a type becomes obsolete. The rules:
- A type that has ever been used in a request cannot be deleted — Collabin refuses, because deleting it would orphan history.
- The right move is to deactivate it: existing requests, reports, and statistics keep working, but the type disappears from the request form.
- Deleting is reserved for types that were created by mistake and never used.
The same applies to system types: deactivate, don't delete.
A practical renaming warning: renaming a type renames it everywhere, including historical requests. "Sick leave" → "Health absence" is fine; renaming "Vacation" to "Home office" rewrites history misleadingly. For a real policy change, deactivate the old type and create a new one.
A sensible starter set
If you're configuring a new organization, this set covers most companies without clutter:
| Type | Flags | Color idea |
|---|---|---|
| Vacation | — | green |
| Sick leave | sick | red |
| Unpaid leave | unpaid | gray |
| Parental leave | — | purple |
| Home office | — | blue |
Start small — you can always add types later, but you can never delete a used one, only deactivate it. Every type you add is also a choice every employee has to scroll past.