Here’s a scenario that has quietly affected leave balances at companies using Odoo’s Time Off module: an HR manager reads the official documentation, configures the “Public Holiday Included” setting based on its guidance, and unknowingly creates a policy that works the opposite of what they intended. The documentation said enabling this option would exclude public holidays from vacation day calculations. The software does the reverse.
The correction is now live, and the implications for anyone who configured this setting based on the old explanation are worth understanding — especially if year-end leave balance reconciliations have been producing numbers that didn’t quite add up.
What the Setting Actually Does
When “Public Holiday Included” is enabled on a leave type, public holidays that fall within a leave request count against the employee’s vacation balance. An employee taking a week off that includes the Fourth of July uses five vacation days, not four. The holiday isn’t automatically excluded — it’s included in the deduction, which is exactly what the setting’s name says when you read it literally.
When the setting is disabled, the system skips public holidays during leave calculation. That same week-long absence costs only four vacation days because the holiday doesn’t count. This is the more common configuration for most companies, since employees shouldn’t typically need to “spend” a vacation day on a day the office is already closed.
Why the Old Documentation Was Dangerous
The previous example in the guide had the logic inverted. It described enabling the setting as a way to protect employees from losing vacation days to public holidays — the exact opposite of what the feature does. An HR manager following that guide who wanted to be employee-friendly (not deducting holidays from balances) would enable the setting, which would then deduct holidays from balances.
The damage depends on leave policy structure. Companies with generous PTO allowances might never notice a one-day discrepancy per holiday. But companies with strict 15-day or 20-day annual allowances in regions with 10+ public holidays per year could see employees effectively losing over a week of vacation to a documentation error.
Checking Your Configuration
The fix is straightforward: review the leave types in your Time Off configuration and verify that the “Public Holiday Included” setting matches your actual company policy. If you want public holidays excluded from vacation deductions — which is what most companies intend — the setting should be disabled, not enabled.
For companies that have been running with the wrong configuration, the decision of whether to retroactively adjust employee balances is a policy call, not a technical one. Odoo’s allocation system allows manual adjustments, but the HR conversation about why balances are changing mid-year is the harder part.
A Naming Problem That Documentation Can’t Fully Solve
The underlying issue is that “Public Holiday Included” is technically accurate but intuitively misleading. Most people read “included” as “taken into account” in the sense of being handled gracefully — not “counted against you.” A label like “Deduct Public Holidays From Balance” would have prevented the confusion entirely, but changing field labels in a mature product has its own cascade of translation and migration issues.
For now, the documentation correction at least ensures that new implementations get it right. Existing deployments should audit their leave type settings, particularly in regions with dense public holiday calendars where the cumulative impact of misconfiguration adds up quickly.