New: Tracking Your Employees' Time Off

You already know you need a policy for vacation and sick time — what you may not know is that each state, and even some cities, have different requirements for vacation and sick time off that you need to comply with.

Those rules cover accrual rates, minimum balances, carryover, and what you owe someone on termination — and they don't stay still. A policy that was compliant last year in a given state might not hold up today.

The problem with how most companies handle this

Without a system, time off tracking usually means a spreadsheet for balances, a shared calendar so people know who's out, and someone manually reconciling both before every payroll run. Three things go wrong almost immediately:

• There's no way to accrue properly. Accrual isn't a flat number — it changes with pay period, tenure, and policy rules. A spreadsheet can't recalculate that for you every cycle, so the balance drifts and nobody notices until someone's cashing it out.
• Employees forget to log time off. Without a system prompting them, people take the day and just... don't record it. Balances stop reflecting reality, and by the time you catch the gap, you're reconstructing history instead of tracking it.
• There's no approval process. Even if you have a policy written down, without a system enforcing it employees can take time off with no controls in place — nobody signs off, nobody checks the balance first, it just happens.

But the biggest issue is the one most founders don't even know they have: these setups are almost always out of compliance. I talked to a company recently that had rolled out a vacation policy in California — reasonable, employee-friendly — and simply never got around to writing a sick leave policy to go with it. In California, that's not an oversight, it's a compliance violation. Sick leave isn't optional once you have employees there, and having a vacation policy doesn't substitute for having a sick policy. It's the kind of gap that sits quietly until an employee leaves, or a state audit asks for your policy documents, and by then it's not a quick fix.

What we built instead

Time Off is now part of the same platform where you run payroll, with the compliance research handled for you rather than left as homework.

When you set up a policy, Every's compliance AI looks at your current census — every state and city where you actually have employees today — and pulls the sick leave and vacation rules for each one, showing you the full list in plain language. No legal degree, no outside counsel required just to get oriented.

Then it does the part that actually saves you time: it finds the strictest requirement across that census — the most sick days, the shortest waiting period, whatever the toughest rule happens to be — and constructs a single policy built around that ceiling. One policy, every state you're currently in covered, no employee shortchanged because of where they happen to live.

You still make the call on what to adopt. The AI's job is to make sure you're making that call with the actual rules in front of you, not a guess.

What's actually in the system

This isn't just the compliance engine bolted onto nothing — it's a full time off system underneath it:

• One policy, or state-level policies with automatic routing — let the AI recommend a single company-wide policy, or customize by state and let Every route each employee to the right one automatically
• Accrual policies that flex with tenure — per pay period, front-loaded annually, or unlimited, with waiting periods, carryover caps, and proration, recalculated every payroll run
• Holiday calendars per country, so time off stays fair across a distributed team
• Dashboards scoped to who's looking — admins see everything, managers see their own reports
• PTO payouts that sync straight to payroll, including termination payouts, so the final check is right the first time
• Master approval control, so an unresponsive manager never becomes the reason a payroll run gets held up

Before you set this up, a few things worth knowing

This doesn't remove your judgment call, it informs it. The AI surfaces the strictest applicable rule and recommends a policy around it — that's the safe default, not the only option. If you'd rather run state-specific policies instead of one blanket policy, you can, and the system will route employees automatically. That tradeoff — simplicity versus a leaner policy per state — is still yours to make.

Migrating from another system doesn't mean resetting anyone's clock. You can set up a policy mid-year and carry over existing balances, so switching doesn't cost your team their accrued time.

Contractors are included, not an afterthought. If you extend paid time off to contractors and not just salaried or hourly employees, the system supports that rather than forcing you into a workaround.

Get started

Time off shouldn't require a compliance review every time you hire in a new state. Set up a policy, let the compliance AI do the legal research, and get back to running your company.

Set up a time off policy → app.every.io/v2/time/time-off