Documentation — Time Off

For Time Off, an app for Jira Cloud. Last updated: 12 August 2026

Time Off lets a team ask for leave, approve it and see who is away — inside Jira, with no separate login and no spreadsheet. This page explains every screen, and exactly how the numbers are worked out.

Installing and finding the app

A Jira administrator installs Time Off from the Atlassian Marketplace. No account, password or invitation is needed — everyone who can already sign in to your Jira site can use it.

After installing, open it from the Apps menu in the Jira top bar and choose Time Off. It opens as a full page, not inside a ticket.

Setting up in five minutes

The app works immediately with sensible defaults, so you can do this in any order. This is the quickest useful path for an administrator:

  1. Settings → Public holidays. Pick the country your team works in. Public holidays never come out of anyone's leave balance.
  2. Settings → Leftover days at the end of the year. Choose what happens on 1 January to days nobody used.
  3. People. Search for each person and set their days per year, their start date and any days brought over from before. Anyone you do not set up gets 20 days a year and the full year, with no start date.
  4. Tell the team to open the app and use My time off.

Asking for leave

On the My time off tab, everyone sees their own balance for the current year and a form to ask for leave.

Before you send it, the app tells you what the request actually costs in working days — for example "That uses 4 days of working time" — and says why when a day is skipped, such as "17 Mar 2026 is St Patrick's Day — not counted".

Your own requests are listed underneath, with their status and any note your manager wrote when deciding.

Cancelling

You can cancel a request yourself while it is still waiting for a decision, or after it has been approved as long as it has not started yet. Cancelling puts the days straight back into your balance.

Approving and declining

The Approvals tab is for whoever decides on leave — currently the Jira administrators of your site. It shows every request waiting for a decision, oldest date first, with the person's name, the dates, the number of working days and their note.

While anything is waiting, a banner appears at the top of every tab and the tab is labelled Approvals (3). Both disappear on their own when the queue is empty.

There is no email notification, on purpose. Atlassian does not give an app the email address of anyone on your site, and the only built-in way to send mail would require the app to create a Jira ticket for every leave request — which would put the reason for an absence, possibly an illness, on a board the whole team can read. We chose privacy over the notification. The banner and the tab count are the signal.

Team calendar and the week grid

The Team calendar tab is visible to everyone, not just managers, so the team can organise itself.

Work schedule

A grid with people down the side and seven days across the top. It answers "who is working today?":

What you seeWhat it means
(blank)Working
Weekend
OffApproved leave
AskedWaiting for a decision
HolidayA public holiday in that person's own country

Use the arrows to move week by week, or This week to jump back.

All time off in the month

Underneath, the whole month around the week you are looking at, as a list: person, dates, days, type and status. It follows the week above, so moving the week moves the month with it. Declined and cancelled requests never appear here.

People — each person's set-up

On the People tab, search for anyone on your Jira site and set:

FieldWhat it doesIf you leave it empty
Days of leave per yearTheir full-year entitlement20 days
Start dateTheir first year is counted from this dateThey get the full year
Days carried over from beforeWhat they already had when you started using the app0
Public holidaysThe country whose holidays apply to themSame as the office

The list shows each person's remaining days, recalculated as you save. Only change the country for people who work somewhere else — an office in Ireland with one person in Portugal works correctly.

Settings — the office rules

Public holidays

The country your team works in. Anyone who works elsewhere gets their own country under People.

Leftover days at the end of the year

On 1 January everyone gets their full year again. This setting decides what happens to the days they did not use:

With a limit you can also set "and they must be used by" — the end of a month, for example the end of March, which is common in Ireland and the UK. Leave taken before that date uses up the carried-over days first. After the date, whatever is left of them is gone, and the new year's own days are untouched. The app warns the person before ("use by 31 Mar") and after ("expired").

Yearly limit per type of leave

Annual leave comes out of each person's own balance. Sick leave, Unpaid leave and Other do not — give them a yearly limit here if your company caps them, for example 5 days of sick leave. Leave it empty for no limit. The request screen tells the person how much is left of that type before they pick a date, and the server refuses a request that goes over.

How the balance is worked out

Balances are never stored. They are recalculated from the requests every time a screen opens, so a corrected request corrects the balance immediately and there is no second copy of the numbers to go stale.

RowMeaning
AllowanceDays for this year — pro-rated in the first year if there is a start date
Carried overDays brought from last year, under your leftover rule
TakenApproved annual leave
PendingAnnual leave waiting for a decision
RemainingAllowance + carried over − taken − pending

Pro-rata example: 25 days a year, starting 1 July 2026, gives 12.5 days for 2026, and the person sees "Your first year is pro-rated from your start date".

Only working days are counted. Weekends and public holidays never come out of a balance, and half days count as 0.5.

Public holidays

Holidays for 17 countries are built in and worked out by rule — Easter, "first Monday of", and the substitute day when a holiday falls on a weekend — so they are correct for any year and nobody has to update a list every December.

National days only. Regional days — a US state holiday, a Spanish regional day, a Swiss cantonal day — are not included, and the app says so on screen. Book those as normal leave.

The year report

On the Report tab, choose a year and build it. You get one line per person: allowance, carried over, taken, pending, remaining, and a column for each leave type that has a yearly limit.

Underneath, the same data as text you can select and paste straight into Excel or Google Sheets — either one line per person or every request, one per line with dates, type, status and the notes. An app that runs inside Jira cannot save a file to your computer, so this is the way out.

Privacy, and erasing a person

Erasing one person's data

Open People, click Edit on the person, and use Erase this person's data. A confirmation screen tells you exactly what will be deleted — their name, their leave set-up and every one of their leave requests — and what will not: your office settings and everybody else's records.

This cannot be undone and there is no copy to restore from. It works even if the subscription has lapsed, because responding to an erasure request is not a paid feature. Note that leave history can be a record your business is required to keep, so check before you erase it.

Full detail: Privacy Policy · Data Processing Agreement.

Pricing and billing

Free for sites with up to 10 users. Above that it is charged per user per month at the price on the Marketplace listing. Billing, invoices, taxes and refunds are handled entirely by Atlassian — we never see a card.

If a subscription lapses: your data is not deleted and is not held hostage. Existing records stay readable, requests can still be cancelled, and a person's data can still be erased. Creating requests, deciding on them and changing settings pause until the subscription is active again.

Known limits

Stated plainly so nothing is a surprise after you install:

If one of these is blocking you, write to us — a customer asking is how these get reordered.

Support

Email support@saoirsesoftware.com, in English, on business days. We aim to reply within two business days, and the email reaches the person who writes the code, not a ticket queue.

When something looks wrong, the most useful things to send are: what you expected, what the screen showed, and the dates involved. We cannot see your data, so we rely on what you tell us.