“Time off” seems simple. But anyone who has ever had to keep track of it for a staff knows it’s surprisingly complex. Perq is for any company that provides time off or “leave” as a benefit to full-time employees and needs a simple way to manage:

• who
• how much
• what type(s)
• when

Perq tracks and communicates those multiple, interrelated points of information, according to rules you create. You set the rules; Perq does the math and keeps things organized.

Leave is an asset most businesspeople—employees and employers—take for granted. Policy is often unclear and keeping up with accurate records is difficult to manage. Its complexity causes billions of dollars of accounting inaccuracy each year.

Perq provides transparency, accuracy, and flexibility – The rules are in plain view, right alongside the requests and approvals. Rules can apply to everyone or be customized for each employee. And if exceptions are necessary, Perq accounts for them readily.

Perq exemplifies the philosophy that form and function are not mutually exclusive. We believe that tools for serious business can also be easy and enjoyable to use. With a longstanding reputation for world-class human-centered research and design, Matter developed Perq with the user experience as the highest priority.

Perq is simple and powerful – a few controls and well-designed screens; an abundance of useful information and functionality.

Perq uses company email addresses to manage company accounts and sends notices via email. A person authorized to administer the account (with billing information) should claim the company domain using his/her own company email address. (Someone else can be made Administrator later, if desired.)

New account registrants entering an email address with that company’s domain must be approved by the account Administrator.

Perq is based on the premise that your company has a leave policy (or would like to create one easily),  and that policy consists of rules for various types of leave.

To set up Perq, you must have knowledge and authority to implement your company policy for employee leave.

Once set up, Perq can easily function as the resource for leave policy for everyone in the company. Perq clarifies policy, minimizes questions, and can supplement your company handbook.

The leave you manage with Perq is implicitly paid time off, but you can use Perq in whatever way suits your policy. In instances where it's common to specify a combination of paid and unpaid leave, Perq gives you flexible controls to specify both allowances.

These implicit and default settings are ideal for most companies, and when you need to set things up a little differently, Perq has the flexibility to support your own unique policies.

Perq is for managing leave – it does not track worked hours and operates independently of payroll systems.

It does: show absence days on a shared calendar (and iCal, Outlook, Google, etc.), track the days you've taken, the days you've scheduled, and remaining days allowed for every type of leave specified in your custom company policy.

There are three user account types:

Staff – Employees who will be subject to leave policy and make leave requests.

Approver – Approvers are users who can approve leave requests.

Administrator – An administrator has all the privileges in Perq: to create and manage policy, add user accounts, manage account type and payment information, and also approve leave requests.

Of course, Approvers and Administrators can manage their own leave too.

Leave increments in days and quarters of days, because that’s how most people think about time off. A lot of automated systems account for time in hours, but when's the last time you heard someone say they really could use 7.5 hours off? (For those who use accrual, the rate can be set to hours or days.) We believe technology should work for people, not the other way around.

Perq uses a five-day work week, and a customizable standard work day. Rules and calculations are based on calendar years.

One of the central ideas of Perq is to allow you to flexibly create policy, as well as manage according to policy you already have. So, besides allowing you to easily create rules for just about any type of leave you can think of, Perq also offers levels of each type. This means you can have up to three different “Perqs” for each Leave Type, based on tenure or whatever conditions you choose.

Vacation, for example, might be granted as five days paid leave to employees in their first year. Let’s call that Perq Level 1. But let’s say you want to provide more Vacation Leave to tenured employees – they get more days after their first year.

You decide that after a year of full-time employment, your company will provide 10 days paid Vacation. Just create Perq Level 2 with those settings, and the Perq system will automatically manage eligibility, notification, and tracking for all employees in the system.

You create the rules for leave benefits in one central location; Perq ensures they are communicated and applied.