PTO policies can get rather complex at times! Even a policy that sounds pretty straightforward can be a bit complicated to manage when it gets down to the actual details. Take, for example, a policy where an employee earns 10 vacation days per year, accrued monthly. Seems easy enough to understand, but let's look at how the actual math works out and some possible issues that arise:

First, let's look at how the time off is earned. The policy grants 10 total days for the year, but the employee earns that time off in 12 even monthly increments/accruals throughout the year. So...we've hit our first little math fact: employees won't earn time off in whole days. 10 days divided by 12 months means each accrual will be 0.8333 days.

Second, let's look at how the time off is spent. Many companies allow employees to use time off in less than full-day increments. A company might allow employees to spend time off in 15-minute increments, for example. This means a request might end up being a fraction of a day.

And third, let's consider work schedules. An employee might not always work the same number of hours each day of the week. Monday might be 8 hours, Tuesday might be 6 hours, and so on. So the concept of a "day" becomes pretty problematic in this scenario. Taking a "day" off on Monday equates to a different amount of time than it does on Tuesday. 

The above three factors are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the complexity that can arise in implementing PTO policies. Built is designed to handle the most complex and widest possible range of scenarios possible, and with the highest degree of accuracy of any product on the market. In order to do so, the system is designed to handle all calculations in hours rather than in days.
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