Time off, done right.
OpenBranchHQ runs the whole request → approve → balance loop: realistic policies, multi-step approvals, and balances computed from a ledger — so they never drift.
- Ledger balances
Never stored — always the sum of the entries.
- Hour-accurate
Weekends and public holidays never cost a day.
- Audit trail
Every change with actor, target and time.
- Self-hostingComing soon
Run it on your own infrastructure.
How it works
Set the rules once. The rest runs itself.
Policies drive requests, requests drive approvals, approvals drive the ledger. Nothing is typed twice.
- 1
Set your policies
Per location and leave type: quota, accrual, carryover, and who approves.
- 2
People request in seconds
Pick a type, pick dates. Working days, holidays and the balance after are computed live.
- 3
Approve, and the ledger updates
Approval is the only thing that deducts. A balance is always the sum of its entries.
Features
Everything leave, nothing extra
The essentials, built carefully. No bloat, no lock-in.
Policies
Policies that match reality
Real companies don't have one rule. Set quotas per location, choose how balance is earned, cap what carries over and when it expires, and give each policy its own approval chain.
Granted up front or accrued — Monthly, weekly, every two weeks or yearly, with a balance cap.
Pro-rated on join — Someone starting mid-year gets a share of the quota, not all of it.
Carryover with an expiry — “Up to 5 days carries over, expires Mar 31.”
Blackouts, probation, public holidays — Hard-block launch week or force manual approval; keep a leave type off-limits during probation; import a country's holidays per location in one click.
Requests
Requests that compute themselves
Employees pick a leave type and a date range. OpenBranchHQ counts working days, skips weekends and public holidays, handles half-days, and shows the balance after — before they submit.
Live preview — Working days, current balance, this request, balance after.
Half-days and custom hours — One click for a half day, or an exact number of hours.
Attachments — PDF, JPG or PNG, up to 5 files per request.
Warnings before submit — Blackout dates and insufficient balance are flagged in the form, and the approval path is shown up front.
Approvals
Approvals that route themselves
Build an approval chain once — direct manager, manager's manager, or a specific person — and attach it per policy. Approvers get one queue, oldest first, with everything they need to decide.
Multi-step chains — Up to ten steps; each decides after the one above.
Delegation — Hand approvals to a substitute for a date range; requests reroute automatically.
Reminders and escalation — A stale step gets an email nudge, then escalates.
Decide with context — Dates, duration, stage, their note, and a Blackout flag when it matters.
Balances
Balances you can audit
OpenBranchHQ never stores a balance. Every number is the sum of a ledger — accruals, deductions, carryover, adjustments, expiry — so it can't drift, and every change has an author and a time.
A ledger, not a column — Approval is the only write that deducts.
Overrides on the record — Individual entitlement overrides and manual adjustments, all logged.
Reports HR and finance trust — Leave Balance Report per type, Leave Liability in hours, every request exportable to CSV.
Year-end runs itself — Carryover rolled over and expired by the job runner.
Locations & departments
Built for more than one office
Every location gets its own timezone, leave year, public holidays and policies. Departments group people for the calendar and keep blackouts scoped to the teams they affect.
A leave year per location — January in Athens, April in London — carryover and accrual follow the location.
Public holidays per location — Import a country's calendar in one click; holidays never draw from a balance.
Policies per location — The same leave type can carry a different quota and approval chain by country.
Departments — Group people, filter the calendar, and scope blackouts to the teams that need them.
Calendar
See coverage before you approve
One timeline per month: people grouped by department, a holidays-and-blackouts lane, and a coverage row that counts who's out each day.
Department lanes — “12 people · 3 out today” per section.
Holidays and blackouts lane — Country flags for holidays, dashed bars for blackouts.
Coverage row — People out per day, heat-shaded.
Subscribe from your calendar — Your team's approved leave in Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar.
Admin & security
Built for the people who run it
Roles that map to how HR works, an append-only activity log, two-factor auth, and the small things — ⌘K, dark mode, transactional emails for every decision.
Roles — Owner, Admin, HR, Employee; every screen and query is permission-checked.
Activity log — Every mutation, filterable by event, actor, target and time.
Account security — Two-factor (TOTP + backup codes), Google sign-in, active-session list.
Every org isolated — Each query is scoped to your organization.
Why OpenBranchHQ
Small team, careful software
The things we got right on purpose — and what's next.
Hour-accurate
Weekends, public holidays and half-days are handled in the math, not in a note.
Ledger balances
Never stored, always computed. They can't drift.
Policy realism
Accrual, proration, carryover, expiry, probation, blackouts.
Delegation built in
Approvers go on holiday too. Their queue follows a substitute.
Your calendar, synced
Team time off in Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar — colleagues show as Out of office.
Audit everything
An append-only activity log with event, actor, target and time.
Your data stays yours
Export requests and balances to CSV. Delete your organization when you want.
Dark mode & ⌘K
A command palette that only shows what you're allowed to open.
On the roadmap
Documents
Coming soonA company library with role-based sharing, plus per-employee My Docs.
Asset management
Coming soonLaptops and equipment with a custody trail, assigned per employee.
Self-hosting
Coming soonRun it on your own infrastructure.
AI assistant
Coming soonA permission-scoped chat that answers leave questions from your live org data — as the logged-in user.
Access management
Coming soonConnected apps, identity matching, and provisioning that revokes access on offboarding.
API & webhooks
Coming soonA versioned REST API with scoped keys, and signed webhooks for leave, employee, asset and document events.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Who is OpenBranchHQ for?
Growing teams — roughly ten to a few hundred people — that have outgrown a spreadsheet for time off but don't want an HR suite. If you have more than one location, more than one approver, or a finance team that asks about leave liability, it's built for you.
How are balances calculated?
Every balance is the sum of a ledger: accruals, carryover, deductions, adjustments and expiries. Nothing stores a running total, so a balance can never disagree with its history. Everything is tracked in hours and shown in days or hours depending on the leave type.
Can I import existing employees and holidays?
Yes. Employees come in by CSV or by email invitation, and public holidays are imported per location by picking a country and a year.
Can I self-host?
Not yet — OpenBranchHQ is offered as a hosted service today. Self-hosting is on the roadmap.
What happens when someone leaves?
You schedule their last day. Until then they keep working normally; on the day they move to Offboarding, their balances are closed out on the ledger, and once nothing blocks it they're archived — never deleted. If they come back, you rehire the same record.
Ready to stop chasing time-off spreadsheets?
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