# The leave balance looks wrong

**For:** Manager | Admin
**You'll need:** Nothing.

A balance is too low, too high, or showing zero when you expected days. Leave balances are the running total of every transaction in the leave ledger — grants, accruals, bookings, reversals, carry-overs. If the balance looks wrong, one of those transactions is missing, late, or unexpected.

## Check five possibilities

1. **The period hasn't been started yet.** Initial entitlement grants only post when an admin starts the company period for the year. If the period sits in **'Open'** but **'Start'** was never clicked, no grants exist — balance is zero. See {doc}`/set-up-your-company/company-periods/start-a-company-period`.
2. **Accrual hasn't run.** Monthly or hourly accrual policies post their grants over the year, not all at once. Check the policy: a person early in the year on a monthly-accrual policy will have a small balance on purpose.
3. **Carry-over expired.** If the leave policy caps carry-over (or expires it after a deadline), unused balance from last year was zeroed when the new period opened. Check the carry-over rule on the policy.
4. **A prior-illness link wasn't applied.** For sick leave under EFZG §3, a fresh spell inside the linking window should be linked to the previous one — not granted a fresh entitlement. If the admin missed the link prompt when approving, the second spell looks like new days. The fix is to revoke and re-approve, ticking the link checkbox this time.
5. **Manual transactions in the ledger.** HR may have posted manual adjustments — a correction, a sabbatical clawback, a one-off bonus. Open the leave ledger to see every signed transaction in order.

## Still stuck?

Email {{ support_email }} with: your company name, your email, the time the problem started, and what you were trying to do.

## Related

- {doc}`/manage-leave/leave-transactions/view-the-leave-ledger`
- {doc}`/manage-leave/leave-policies/index`
- {doc}`/manage-leave/leave-policies/efzg-spell-linking`