Understand statutory warnings

Pauzora ships each country template with the statutory values written into Polish law — 20 or 26 vacation days a year, 4 on-demand days, the September 30 deadline for carried-over leave, the 33-day sick-leave tracking threshold. When your configuration or a request crosses one of those values, the system shows an amber warning. This article explains what those warnings mean, why they never stop anyone, and what to do when you see one.

Warnings never block

A statutory warning is an advisory, not an error. Pauzora is not an arbiter of law: your organization owns its policies, and every value in a policy — including the statutory-looking ones — is yours to change. When something crosses a statutory value:

• Nothing is rejected. A request can still be submitted and approved; a policy change still saves.
• The warning is recorded. When an approver approves a request despite a warning, the warning lands in the request’s history, so the decision stays attributable.

Only limits your organization itself sets to Block in Set absence limits and enforcement can reject a request — and statutory checks can never be configured to block.

Where warnings come from

Statutory values live in the country template your policy was copied from, never in the engine:

• Request warnings. The Polish template seeds the on-demand limit at 4 days and the sick-leave tracking threshold at 33 days, both set to Warn. Exceeding one shows the amber notice to the requester at submission and to the approver at decision time.
• Configuration warnings. Open Settings, then Leave policy. If the selected policy’s configuration falls below a statutory minimum — for example a yearly entitlement under 20 days, a carry-over deadline earlier than September 30, a guaranteed absence type the policy does not offer, or an entry or exit year the policy prorates where the statute grants the full annual entitlement — an amber advisory appears under the policy name, naming the configured value, the statutory minimum, and the legal basis (for example art. 154 §1 k.p.). A policy that conditions an entitlement on age also shows an advisory while employees have no birth year on file — the age-based amount cannot apply to them until it is recorded. A compliant policy shows no advisory at all.

What to do about a warning

1. Read the basis. Every statutory advisory names the legal provision it refers to, so you can check the rule it is pointing at.
2. If the value was a mistake, put it back. Statutory defaults come seeded with every template copy; restoring the seeded value clears the warning.
3. If the value is deliberate, you can leave it. A more generous value than the statute (a higher limit, a later deadline, more days) never warns. A less generous one keeps warning — the warning is the record that the configuration is your organization’s own decision.
4. When in doubt, ask your legal counsel. The warning tells you what the statute says; whether your collective agreement or contract terms justify a different value is a legal question, not a software one.