How much accrued leave is sitting on your balance sheet?

Because it's an amount the business genuinely owes. When an employee takes annual leave they're paid from that accrued balance, and if they resign, any untaken leave is paid out. Accounting standards treat it as a liability on your balance sheet for exactly this reason. The danger for SMEs is that it accrues quietly — no invoice, no due date — so it's tempting to treat it as free. But if several people take leave together, or a few long-tenured staff resign, you have to fund real payouts. The calculator makes that obligation visible in dollars so you can budget for it rather than being caught short.

For each person you enter their annual salary, how many hours of leave they've accrued, and whether leave loading applies. The tool estimates an hourly rate from the salary, multiplies it by the accrued hours, adds the leave-loading uplift where you've marked it, and then adds superannuation on that leave at the current Super Guarantee rate. It sums this across your whole team into a total, with a per-employee breakdown. The results are estimates — your actual liability depends on each person's ordinary hours, the applicable award or agreement, and whether loading is genuinely payable — so treat the figure as a planning tool, not a formal valuation.

Not always. Leave loading is an extra percentage paid on top of the base wage while someone is on annual leave, and whether it's owed depends on the relevant modern award, enterprise agreement, or employment contract — it isn't universal. That's why the tool lets you switch it on or off per employee rather than assuming it. If you apply it where it isn't actually payable, you'll overstate your liability; if you leave it off where it is owed, you'll understate the eventual payout. The safest approach is to check each person's award or agreement (or ask your accountant or bookkeeper) and set the toggle to match, so the total reflects your real obligations.