ESS rejects leave request despite a positive leave balance

An employee receives the following message when submitting leave in ESS:

Insufficient leave entitlement to submit request

The employee may appear to have enough leave in ESS or PayGlobal, but ESS prevents the request from being submitted.

Cause

ESS assesses the employee’s available balance, not necessarily the headline or PayGlobal available current balance. Approved or submitted leave that has not yet been tagged and processed may still be deducted when ESS checks whether sufficient leave is available.

For example, an employee may show 27 hours of personal leave but have 38 hours of additional leave applied for and not yet processed. In this case, ESS correctly treats the employee as having insufficient available leave.

Troubleshooting procedure

1. Confirm the exact error

Obtain:

• Employee code and leave reason.

• Leave dates and requested units.

• Screenshot of the ESS error.

• Balance shown in ESS and PayGlobal.

• Whether the issue affects one employee or multiple employees.

2. Check pending leave requests

In PayGlobal, review the employee’s leave requests for the relevant leave type.

Identify requests that are:

• Approved or submitted but not yet processed.

• Missing a Processed Date.

• Manually entered into PayGlobal but not tagged into the appropriate pay sequence.

Unprocessed requests are included in ESS’s available-balance calculation.

3. Reconcile the balance

Compare:

1. The employee’s current leave balance.

2. Leave already applied for but not processed.

3. Leave paid or deducted in a pay sequence.

4. The requested new leave.

If the pending leave has not been paid or deducted, the ESS error is expected and the employee should not be allowed to submit additional leave that would create an insufficient balance.

If the leave has already been paid or deducted but the request still has no Processed Date, correct the outstanding leave request in accordance with the customer’s payroll controls. Where appropriate, enter the Processed Date so ESS no longer counts the request as unpaid or unprocessed.