Record the vacation entitlement and read the balance

Open an employee, then Vacation entitlement. The panel shows four numbers — agreed days, carried over, taken, remaining — and asks you for the first one.

Why Norman asks instead of calculating

§ 3 BUrlG sets a minimum of 24 working days on a six-day week. Almost no contract stops there, and the real figure lives in the employment agreement, not in any rule Norman could apply. So the agreed days are recorded: you enter them, confirm you checked them against the contract, and name the contract clause.

Norman scales the statutory minimum to the week you actually agreed — 20 working days on a five-day week, 16 on a four-day week — and compares. If the agreed figure is lower, you get a warning naming the shortfall. Norman does not raise the number for you: the agreement is yours to fix, and a silently corrected figure would hide the problem instead of showing it.

Taken days come from the schedule

You never decrement a counter. Taken days are recomputed from the absences: every day inside an active paid vacation entry that the work schedule calls a working day.

That is why a vacation from Monday to the Friday of the following week costs ten days on a five-day week, not twelve — the weekend is not entitlement. If the employee later withdraws the request and you cancel the entry, the days come back on their own.

When the balance is not shown

Sometimes the remaining days say Not available. That is deliberate, and the panel names the reason:

• no entitlement recorded yet — there is nothing to subtract from;
• no work schedule in force — without one, working days cannot be counted at all;
• gaps in the work schedule in the months the vacation touches — the taken days would be incomplete;
• the stored entitlement no longer matches its fingerprint — record it again before relying on it.

A shortfall against the statutory minimum is not one of these. There the balance still shows; only the warning appears.

Carrying days into the next year

§ 7 Abs. 3 BUrlG keeps the entitlement inside the calendar year. Days move into the next one only for urgent operational or personal reasons, and they then expire on 31 March.

So Norman never rolls a balance forward by itself. You enter the carried days, confirm the reason exists, and write what it was into the reference. Once days are carried, the panel shows the expiry date next to them.

Every version is kept

Saving appends a version; nothing is overwritten. Amend the agreement mid-year and both figures stay in the history with their references, so a later reader can see what was agreed when.

If somebody else records a version while your panel is open, saving is refused and the panel offers to reload. It will not quietly replace the numbers you were looking at.

What this does not do

The entitlement is a record and a balance, not a payroll calculation. Paid vacation does not change the monthly gross — the fixed salary already covers those days — and Norman does not compute holiday pay for variable earnings, vacation provisions, or a payout for unused days on termination.

Next: which absence type to choose.