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Every UAE company crosses the same threshold: around fifteen employees, the leave spreadsheet stops working. Balances are disputed, two people from the same team book the same week, and nobody can say what a resigning employee is owed for unused leave — a real liability, since UAE labour law requires unused annual leave to be paid out.
What matters here
- Accrual rules — annual leave that accrues correctly from the joining date, including the first-year proration.
- UAE leave types — annual, sick, maternity, parental, bereavement and Hajj leave, each with its own rules.
- Approval chains — requests routed to the right manager, with cover visibility before approving.
- Clean records — balances and history you can produce in an MOHRE dispute without reconstructing spreadsheets.
The main options
Odoo Time Off handles the request-approve-track loop: employees apply from their phone, managers see the team calendar before approving, and balances accrue by rule rather than by memory. It reads from Odoo Employees, so joining dates, departments and reporting lines are already there — and leave history feeds review cycles run through Odoo Appraisals. Public holidays are configured company-wide, which matters in a country where they move with the lunar calendar.
How to choose
Configure your accrual policy first and test it against three real employees — a new joiner, a long-timer and someone who resigned mid-year. If the software reproduces the payouts your accountant calculated by hand, roll it out. And insist on employee self-service: half the value is HR no longer answering balance questions on WhatsApp.