Express Leave Fortnightly Work Days Templates is a new feature as of August 2025. Templates apply to leave requests only, not timesheets. By default, Express Leave is set up to manage leave requests for employees who work Monday-Friday. For example, if a leave request is submitted for Friday-Tuesday then Saturday and Sunday will not be counted as leave days because Express Leave factors in weekends as well as public holidays (national and regional, for Australia and New Zealand).
If your organisation employs flexible workers who are paid fortnightly, and whose shifts include weekends and public holidays, you can use Fortnightly Work Days Templates to manage leave requests.
Fortnightly Work Days Templates define the days and the number of hours per day each group of employees works. So, if you have both Monday-Friday employees and shift workers, you’ll need to set up a template for each group and assign a template to each employee.
If you would like to have Fortnightly templates enabled, please email our Product Team [email protected]. Once this feature has been enabled in your Express Leave company, the Templates menu will be available on the Company Admin menu if you didn't already have it activated for Weekly templates.
To create a Fortnightly Template:
Log in to Express Leave as the Administrator user.
Before assigning fortnightly templates, check that all leave requests have been approved for employees that will have the new templates assigned.
Choose Templates from the Company Admin menu.
From the Select Pay Frequency field, select Fortnightly.
Click the Create New Template button.
Enter the template name in the Template Name field.
Enter the hours for each day for this group of employees, as shown in the example below. Ensure the total hours for the fortnight add up to the correct number of hours for a fortnightly period, otherwise leave may calculate incorrectly.
From the Public Holidays field, select whether this group of employees work on a public holiday or not.
Choose Save.
Repeat the above steps to create any additional templates required.
Edit an existing Fortnightly template
Log in to Express Leave as the Administrator user.
Choose Templates from the Company Admin menu.
From the Select Pay Frequency field, select Fortnightly.
Select the template to edit from the Select Template field.
Edit the Template Name, Hours for Week 1 and Week 2 and Public Holidays settings as required, and then click Save to save the changes.
Checking the Pay Frequency of your employees
An employee will only be accessible to a fortnightly template if their user record is set to a fortnightly Pay Frequency. To confirm this:
Logged in to Express Leave as an Administrator user, choose Manage Users from the Company Admin menu.
Click the Edit button in the Actions column on the right-hand side of the Employee record.
Check the Pay Frequency field displays as Fortnightly.
Assigning a Fortnightly Template to an employee:
Now that you've set up your fortnightly templates and confirmed your employees that are paid fortnightly, you'll need to assign a fortnightly template to each employee. To assign a fortnightly template to an employee:
Logged in to Express Leave as an Administrator user, choose Manage Users from the Company Admin menu.
For each employee, choose Assign Hours. This will take you into the Standard Work Hours for <username> screen.
Select the required fortnight template from the Select Template field, then choose Save.
The Manage Users employee record will then show the Assigned template name under the Work Days column.
Assigning a Custom Template to an employee
If an employee has a variation to their workdays or their assigned fortnightly template, you can override the hours for each day, as needed, to create a custom fortnightly template for that employee. To do this:
From Manage Users, click on the current template button in the Work Hours Column for the required employee.
In the Standard Work Hours for <employee> screen, make the changes to the hours. To show that the standard template has been overridden, the Load hours from Template field then updates to Custom (before the override, this field displayed the name of the template assigned to the employee).
Click Save to save the changes, which will take you back to the Manage Users screen.
In the Manage Users screen, The template will now display as Custom.
Click Save to save the changes.
You can click on the Work Hours button within Manage Users anytime to edit the template further, or re-assign to a standard template if required.
To unassign a template from an employee:
Choose Manage Users from the Company Admin menu.
For each employee, choose Edit under the Work Days column.
Choose Unassign Hours next to the Load Hours from Template dropdown box.
See also: Express Leave updates August 2025.