Carryover is the year-boundary rule in a vacation policy: what happens to days accrued but not taken when the year ends. Three standard strategies exist:
- Use it or lose it — the balance resets to zero. Keeps the books clean and pushes people to actually rest, but punishes exactly those who postponed vacation for the company's sake.
- Cap — up to N days roll over (five is a common cap), the rest expire. The pragmatic middle: bounded liability, no burned loyalty.
- Unlimited — everything rolls over. Generous on paper, but unused PTO is a real liability: in many jurisdictions it must be paid out at termination, and years of quiet accumulation surface as a lump sum on someone's last day.
Two things override whatever the policy says. Statutory rules — some countries mandate minimum carryover windows or payout terms, so the policy must encode the strictest applicable law. And capacity reality — a team that hoards days all year takes them simultaneously in December or Q1, which is a staffing problem wearing an HR policy's clothes.
In Helia, the carryover strategy — lose, cap with a day limit, or unlimited — is part of each time-off policy; the year-end rollover recomputes every balance automatically, and that balance is what employees and approvers see on the time-off screens all year.