Hybrid work: set up a monthly home office quota that vacation reduces

Many hybrid offices run on a simple rule: up to 8 home office days a month, nothing carried over — and vacation days count against it. In Collabin you can model exactly that with quota rules on a leave type. This guide sets up a monthly home office quota step by step and shows what employees and approvers see. Quota rules are available on the Advanced and Pro plans.

What you will set up

• A Home office leave type with a quota of 8 days per month.
• Unused days expire at the end of each month — nothing is carried over.
• Vacation reduces the quota in the same month: 3 vacation days leave 5 home office days.
• Requests over the quota are blocked (or, if you prefer, only flagged for approvers).
• Vacation itself stays a normal yearly allowance.

Step 1: Create the home office type

Open General settings → Vacation Types and click Add (managing leave types is Admin-only). Name the type, for example "Home office", and pick a color.

At the bottom of the form you'll find the Quota rules section. Under Quick setup, choose Monthly home office. This fills in everything in one click:

• Quota period: Monthly
• Default quota: 8 days/month — applies to everyone without an individual value
• When a request exceeds the quota: Block (the request cannot be submitted)
• Which leave types should reduce this quota? — the built-in vacation type is pre-selected

The summary below the form updates live, including a worked example, so you can read the rule in plain words before saving.

A fresh organization also contains a built-in Remote Work type that is inactive by default. You can activate and configure that one instead of creating a new type.

Step 2: Choose what reduces the quota

In Which leave types should reduce this quota?, tick every leave type whose days should count against home office in the same month — typically vacation, perhaps unpaid leave. Sick leave is usually left out.

Two details matter:

• The selected types are never limited by this rule. Employees can always request vacation; it only reduces that month's home office quota.
• Pending vacation already counts, so nobody can work around the rule while a request waits for approval. If the vacation is rejected or withdrawn, the home office days come back immediately.

Step 3: Warn or block?

When a request exceeds the quota decides what happens at the limit:

• Block — the request cannot be submitted. The request form explains why ("exceeds the Home office quota for October 2026 by 1 day"), and the API rejects it as well.
• Warn — the request can still be submitted, and approvers see an "Over the quota" badge on the Approvals page. Choose this if your managers prefer to decide case by case.

If a request goes over the quota after it was submitted — for example because a vacation in the same month was added later — approvers can still approve it; the confirmation repeats the warning first.

Step 4: Keep vacation yearly

Your vacation type keeps its yearly allowance. If you don't want the 1/12-per-month accrual for vacation, open the vacation type and set When is the yearly allowance available? to The full allowance from the start of the year. This per-type setting overrides the organization default on the Allowance rules & year transition page, so other types can keep accruing monthly.

Individual exceptions

Part-timers or special agreements? Open Members, choose Set Allowance for the person and enter a different Monthly quota (days/month) for the year. Leave the field empty to use the type's default; Reset to default removes an individual value.

How the numbers work

Take October with the setup above:

A new 3-day home office request for October would exceed the quota by 1 day — with Block it cannot be submitted, while a 2-day request still fits.

Only working days count, exactly as for any leave: weekends and public holidays don't use the quota, half days count as 0.5, and a request spanning two months is checked month by month.

What everyone sees

• Employees see a monthly card on the dashboard ("Monthly quota", the vacation deduction and what's left), and the request form shows the quota per month before submitting.
• Approvers see badges on the Approvals page when a request is over the quota, or when a vacation request would push someone's home office over it.
• HR and admins find a Quota monitor tab under Statistics: one row per employee, one column per month, over-quota months highlighted, with an Excel export.

Good to know

• Weekly quotas work the same way (Quick setup: Weekly home office); weeks run from Monday to Sunday.
• Monthly and weekly quotas are never carried over into the next year; the year change can only renew an individual per-month value.
• Changing the rules later recalculates past months in reports. Requests that were already approved stay approved.
• If your organization moves to the Free plan, the settings are kept but no longer block requests or deduct other leave types.
• The REST API exposes the rules on GET /v1/leave-types (quota_period, default_quota, overrun_policy, deducting_leave_type_ids), and POST /v1/leaves answers 422 QUOTA_EXCEEDED for blocked requests — see the API quickstart.