Open Source Leave Management System – PHP based



It’s early year 2009 and I noticed several search terms related to Leave Management System. Some of the search terms include:

  • Free leave application php
  • Open source web leave tracking system
  • Download source code for online leave management

Obviously people are looking for ways to manage leaves and absences in a more organized manner. Photo by James Cridland

There are many advantages of utilizing a web based leave tracking system:

  • Eliminates paper based leave application forms
  • Leave applications can be submitted online
  • Leave applications can be approved online
  • Both the leave applicant as well as the approver can view the remaining leave days as well as historical leave applications

So if your organization is still managing staff’s leaves using hardcopy papers, it’s time to implement a web based leave management system.

Most HR Management systems (HRMS) out there have this particular feature built in. Enterprise HRMS such as Peoplesoft, SAP HR and Oracle HRMS has leave management capability which can be customized to suite your organizations leave management processes. For those who can’t afford to implement these enterprise software, your organization can consider implementing open source solutions.

An open source leave management system which is php based is OrangeHRM.

OrangeHRM is simple and easy to use for the administrators, applicants and approvers.

Employees can easily:

  • Apply for leaves online where upon submission, the supervisor will be notified via email that there is a leave to approve
  • View the number of remaining leave days
  • View historical leave taken

HR administrators can easily:

  • Define day offs
  • Define holidays
  • Assign available leave days for each employee
  • View a list of employees going on leave within a specified time period
  • Define leave types such as annual leave, unpaid leave, compassionate leave, etc

To have OrangeHRM up and running, there are two options. Option one would be to get a technical person who is familiar with the LAMP environment to download OrangeHRM and help set up / configure OrangeHRM.

If your organization doesn’t have a technical staff, you can subscribe to OrangeHRM’s On-Demand where there is nothing to install and maintain. Just pay a minimal fee depending on the number of users you have and you’re good to go.

For more details on OrangeHRM, check out their website.

So far the only free an open source leave management system that I can find out there is OrangeHRM. If anyone knows of another one with similar capabilities. please do highlight in the comment box below. Paid versions of leave systems are also welcome, but do make sure it’s good and affordable. With the economic downturn, we all need to be careful with our IT / HR spending.

Additional Resources (Free)

To my dear readers, I’m currently planning on developing my very own Leave Management System and releasing it under General Public License. Would appreciate it if you could briefly state your  requirements for a leave management system on the comment box below so that I could incorporate it in during this initial planning stage. Your feedback is valuable to me. Thank you in advance

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  • 23 Responses to 'Open Source Leave Management System – PHP based'

    1. Open Source PHP Content Management » Software for Enterprise - January 7th, 2009 at 11:54 pm

      [...] Updated 7 Jan 2009. Came here looking for PHP based Leave Management System? Check out this post on Open Source Leave Management System – PHP based Did you like this post? Subscribe to Wareprise.com today. It is [...]

    2. Nilufer Nilar - January 8th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

      I too have not seen another product which is open source and free for leave management.
      Just to add to the leave feature, it has many other modules like time tracking, benefits, recruitment etc.

    3. Teresa Gabbert - January 8th, 2009 at 3:42 pm

      Hi,

      Thanks for posting about OrangeHRM, we really appreciate the support.

      OrangeHRM additionally covers Personal Information Management, Employee Self Service, Time&Attendance, Benefits, and Recruitment, all free of charge.

      Teresa Gabbert,
      Community Representative
      OrangeHRM Inc.

    4. Don Marko - February 7th, 2009 at 12:09 am

      I agree OrangeHRM maybe the only opensource at the moment, however they still lack many features and its not practical to be used in real corporate environment.

      And though they tend to get comments from the forums (in other words, they get free quality testing) from the users in the forums, however, they tend to charge for simple features that should be in the software.

      For example, they have leave management system, but one who is away on medical sick, could not even post or attach a proof slip for medical sick.

      And they approval system is limited to a single approver workflow (though the software support to have more than one user as the approver). For example, if an employee applies for leave, either his immediate supervisor or department head would be able to approve the leave. This may not be ideal, if you want the workflow to go similar to this:

      Employee Apply Leave > Supervisor Supports Application > Department Head Approves.

      On the administration side, say example you would have 50 employees with 6 type of leave category and to allocate leave for these employees, you will have to manually define and allocate leave employee by employee manner. So, this translates 50user x 6 leave type = 300 times. The more employees you have, the longer time u will have to spend as it doesnt support rule based leave configuration.

      They do have categories of employee, you can define whether an employee is in Management or Skill worker. However, these EEO categories have little or minimal use to leave management. You cannot even define different leave configuration for different category of employees, which defeats the purpose of having the EEO in the OrangeHRM system.

      Now, you might argue that its open source and that the community should assist in enhancing the system. However, I must point out that the support from the creators of orangehrm is extremely poor and many times when you ask question in the forum/email, you will get a reply to subscribe to their customisation package.

      They have one of the worst open source forums due to their “ineffective marketing strategy” that most of time suggest users to subscribe to their customisation package. There were one or two contributors in the forum, who have abandon Orangehrm due to this mentality.

      OrangeHRM use the coomunity to get free quality testing and free marketing for their services.

      OrangeHrm is a good concept, but its not ready for real office environment. You will spend more time seeking answers than making the software to work.

    5. Wareprise.com - February 8th, 2009 at 12:57 am

      Don, I do agree with all of your points.

      OrangeHRM is an open source HRMS suitable for organizations with less than 20 staffs. If there are more than 20 staffs, I can really imagine the pain for the administrator to manually define and allocate leaves for each staff. At the moment the organization I work with has less than 20 staffs so it’s still bearable.

      As for leave approval workflow, yes, it only supports a single level of approver. Again this feature is suitable for smaller organization as staffs seldom have that many heads to report to. In our organization, we only report to aingle boss so workflow isn’t a problem.

      I have seen implementations of Leave Management using Sharepoint. Leave administration is really easy and workflow can be easily assigned to different approvers using k2.net. However the cost to implement this sort of system is really huge and time consuming too.

      SO we can see that there is indeed a market for enterprise open source leave management system. For now, we can only rely on OrangeHRM. Hopefully more open source players would take up this opprtunity to fill the gap. Perhaps those from SugarCRM could create SugarHRMS… that would be really neat.

      Btw, I find SugarCRM to be one of the best open source solutions out there in terms of features, support and most importantly provides value.

    6. Nilufer Nilar - February 16th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

      Hi Don,

      I too agree to many points that you raised.
      You have pointed some of the good features lacking in OrangeHRM.

      1. Quota allocation based on EEO category.
      2. Multiple supervisor approval.
      3. Proof slip attachment for medical leave
      etc

      The requirements captured through forum or any other means are not actually omitted.
      Many of them get added to the product based on the demand from the community.
      Almost all the good features are considered but can’t expect them to be added so soon.

      So if anyone need to expedite the development, OrangeHRM charges. Its reasonable right ?

      Check for the new features that are going to be added to the next stable release 2.5. They are too such features requested by many.
      Some are ..

      1. Attendance reports separated from project timesheets(Employee, Supervisor and Admin view)
      2. Resume attaching for job applications
      3. New theme
      etc
      May be leave list for supervisors also get added.

      Btw they get free quality testing as well as provide free support too through the forum.

    7. hysen - March 8th, 2009 at 3:50 pm

      thanks

    8. Ed - April 2nd, 2009 at 11:30 am

      Hi Wareprise.com,

      You said “I have seen implementations of Leave Management using Sharepoint. Leave administration is really easy and workflow can be easily assigned to different approvers using k2.net. However the cost to implement this sort of system is really huge and time consuming too.”

      Now, im looking for the Leave Management System running on Sharepoint platform. The sharepoint is already in place at my office and we have implemented the free Resource Reservation system on it.
      My Question:
      Is there any free version of this Sharepoint-based Leave system on the net? If no, do you know the vendor who you have seen the implementation before?
      Thanks

    9. Wareprise.com - April 3rd, 2009 at 1:32 pm

      Ed,

      I havent seen a free version of Sharepoint based Leave system, but I guess Leave Management is something that you can try to build depending on your key requirements.

      If you have MOSS 2007, there are basic workflow capabilities already in place. I believe this workflow capability is built on top of the Windows Workflow Foundation. This is a good resource on WWF. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa480215.aspx

      So to implement your leave management system on Sharepoint, it really depends on how much automation is required. Some would just create a custom list with the necessary fields in it, and use that to track absenses without much approval routing. I have also seen aspx forms built and integrated with K2.net workflow engine to have an end to end leave management system.

      I guess moving forward, you can try to contact your local Sharepoint Implementors for a demo and quotation. They should have something like this already since it’s just forms together with some workflow capabilities. This could be one starting point.

      If I do see any free Leave Management System which you could easily integrate into Sharepoint, will let you know.

      Also, have you read this case study. http://www.gatewaytechnolabs.com/case_studies/solutions/en/LeaveManagementSystem_CaseStudy_Sharepoint.pdf Might be of value to you.

    10. Ed - April 6th, 2009 at 2:18 pm

      Hi Wareprice.com,
      This a great! Thanks so much.

    11. فارکس - April 15th, 2009 at 9:26 pm

      Thanks so much

    12. gun pos - April 26th, 2009 at 3:25 am

      I searched on google and I had a hard time located the right info….until I found your blog.

    13. programming jobs for filipinos - May 15th, 2009 at 9:57 pm

      I think this is really a nice tool for companies. My previous employer is actually having a hard time tracking our leaves before. I hope they now have this.

    14. Beli - July 23rd, 2009 at 1:43 am

      Hi Wareprice.com. I think that OrangeHRM maybe the only opensource at the moment. I have not seen any other product which is open source and free for leave management. Thanks.


      SEO Stuttgart

    15. sawan kumar - October 20th, 2009 at 10:05 am

      hello! i m sawan
      i m eager abt to know hw the leave management will work on the internet.
      what would be the design fr a leavemanagement.

    16. Brian Reale - November 1st, 2009 at 5:32 am

      ProcessMaker is open source BPM and Workflow. It is a PHP application with an architecture very close to Orange HRM. Combining ProcessMaker + OrgangeHRM might be exactly the solution a lot of people are looking for for leave management. ProcesMaker already has an out of the box leave management workflow and it can easily update the tables in OrangeHRM via web services or direct connection to the MySQL tables of Orange.

    17. Reise - November 3rd, 2009 at 4:56 pm

      Thank you for this website. It is a good information.

    18. SGN - November 19th, 2009 at 1:59 am

      Is there a CV management system available in Open Source?

    19. Wareprise.com - November 19th, 2009 at 2:19 pm

      SGN, I would recommend this one called CATS Applicant Tracking System (ATS). Download via this URL, http://sourceforge.net/projects/catsone/

      This open source tool is no longer supported as the developers have turned the app into a SAAS web based tool.

      Check out the free version of CATS, https://www.catsone.com/content/features. It allows you to store up to 2000 CVs for free and its something you can begin right away without having to install anything.

    20. Ranjeet shrivastava - February 17th, 2010 at 6:26 pm

      i want demo and zip of leave managment system for the company policy. u can send and attach this application.

    21. beverly - February 18th, 2010 at 4:11 pm

      help us

    22. Staff Absence Tracker - February 25th, 2010 at 10:42 pm

      if anyone’s interested, we offer a service which has many more benefits than this. our version also comes with a free 5 user account

    23. Willem Aandewiel - March 11th, 2010 at 4:11 pm

      You might want to take a look at this:

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/openleave/


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