tl;dr: I made a leave calculator for new parents, to help work out how much time they can have off work. It's here: https://planr.baby/
Hey everyone,
We recently had a baby, and I was surprised at how difficult it was to plan my leave. I'd worked for my employer for a long time, and I had annual leave, long service leave, and the standard work leave as well. Basically, I just wanted to stick all this leave together and see how long I could have off work. This was affected by a few things:
- Work-provided maternity leave was a standard "weekly" allowance and would not be affected by public holidays. A week could have two public holidays or zero, it would still use up a "week" of provided leave.
- Annual leave or long service leave was an hourly leave and would be affected by public holidays.
- "Paid Parental Leave" had to be taken at a time when you weren't at work, so could only be taken if you were on paid or unpaid leave at work.
Trying to work this out with a heavily pregnant wife or newborn was not a good idea. I also found it very hard to claim on the government's Paid Parental Leave scheme. From talking to friends, some did not claim the Paid Parental Leave scheme via the government program because they didn't know how, or didn't know how it was different from what work provided.
To me, this is a big deal, because the PPL is worth $176.55 per day. Across 20 weeks, that's $17,655 pre-tax that new parents are possibly just skipping. These might be people who are already on leave from work or have quit work to look after the baby. (https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/how-much-parental-leave…).
With that in mind, I thought I would try my hand at developing a tool to help plan leave that parents may take with their new arrival. It automatically loads public holidays in from the government, and lets you add in your leave types from work. In the end, you get a plan that tells you when your leave starts and ends, and on what days you'll switch over to a new type of leave. There's also a report that visualises each day in your leave, to make it easier to understand, and when a day has been skipped due to a public holiday.
There's no "server-side" to this, everything is processed and stored on your device. Navigate away and all of your stored details will be there next time you visit the site. I briefly considered running ads on the site (not to say they'll never come), but I thought about how gross I felt in the first three months of no sleep with a baby, and if I accidentally clicked on an ad for a $2 grater I probably would have screamed. There's a donation option on the last page, and everything will help keep the app online and up to date.
The link is here: https://planr.baby/. There are probably a few bugs or corner cases I haven't fully ironed out. But feedback is welcome. I've tried to make it visually appealing, and the use of it obvious.
Let me know what you think 😊. It's written in Angular and Angular Material for the UI, for those who are interested.
Forced donation just to see if it works?
"Please enter at least $5"