The HR department touches every part of the employee lifecycle, from payroll and benefits to learning and development. An organization’s ability to offer a smooth, enjoyable employee experience depends heavily on the success of its technology. Your human resources information system (HRIS), payroll platform, and applicant tracking system ensure that employees are hired, onboarded, and employed with efficiency and ease.
Because HR has so many functions, its tech can sometimes play double duty. Some teams use their HRIS to manage recruiting, for example. Others may leverage a platform add-on to manage FMLA leave. Organizations of all sizes, if under-resourced, can find themselves using their tools this way.
These technology crossovers can help teams function for a time, but HR needs purpose-built solutions for its more complex duties. Leave and accommodations, for instance, has become extraordinarily complicated. It’s also high stakes: mistakes can lead to costly fines, legal trouble, and cultural repercussions.
To bolster operations and manage risk, HR needs a spot for leave and accommodations in its tech stack. The right HR systems will allow your team to manage leave and accommodations with efficiency, compliance, and compassion.
Why Leave and Accommodations Need a Spot in the Tech Stack
Today’s leave and accommodations managers face three serious challenges, each of which highlight the importance of high-quality technology.
Staying Compliant has Become Complex and Time-Consuming
There’s an increasing number of laws governing the workplace, and their provisions often overlap. On a federal level, HR must stay compliant with entangled laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA). HR professionals must heed state and local statutes, too. With more employees working remotely, HR often needs to comply with unfamiliar legislation in multiple states.
These factors make it easy for someone to make a compliance mistake, even as they try their best. HR may send the wrong form or miss a mandated deadline. Someone could misunderstand a worker’s eligibility or miss a crucial provision.
Caseloads Keep Growing as Requests Pour In
Employees are asking for leave more than ever before. More than 55% of HR leaders saw an increased accommodation needs and leave request volume in both 2024 and 2025, according to AbsenceSoft research. This leaves HR teams processing more requests for support, ushering them into the tangled web of workplace laws at greater frequency.
Outdated Processes without the Right Tech
With such a complex workload, HR pros need their tools to work for them, not against them. But most juggle a mess of spreadsheets, navigate siloed processes, and put up with email-based workflows. These processes only add to the risks of leave and accommodations management, rather than simplifying HR’s workload and reducing the possibility of error.
These challenges leave HR drowning in administrative work and exposed to a heightened risk of non-compliance. It’s too easy for busy, hardworking professionals to forget to follow up with an employee and let a case fall through the cracks. A modern HR tech stack, powered by intelligent automation, solves these issues. With the right solution that drives smart, streamlined compliance, your team can save time, increase visibility, and protect itself from costly errors.
What Makes AbsenceSoft Different
AbsenceSoft is purpose-built to solve the problems leave managers face today. Our platform is not a bolt-on or generic tool. Created by leave experts, our software is engineered specifically for leave and accommodations, while easily integrating with large, complex HR systems.
Our Intelligent Compliance Engine
Take, for example, the AbsenceSoft Compliance Engine™ (ACE). This central function tracks more than 200 laws. Maintained by compliance experts, it updates forms and communications the moment legal change takes effect.
ACE also serves as the foundation for workflows, allowing you to intelligently automate tasks related to eligibility, entitlement, approvals, return to work, and accommodations. These built-in automations make sure critical processes are followed and keep your to-do list short.
It’s worth noting that workflows apply to more than FMLA tracking. The AbsenceSoft platform includes ADA and PWFA workflows, to ensure your processes keep moving even when different laws come into play. Users can also easily create custom workflows for custom company policies and to streamline their workloads even further.
The ACE Packet Generator
In our State of Leave and Accommodations Report, many respondents self-reported frustrations over paperwork. One employee described how paperwork issues impacted her leave experience: “The paperwork process was horrible and paperwork kept getting lost. And then I would have to get it and fill it out again. Awful.”
The ACE Packet Generator automates the often-painstaking process of providing employees with the documents, forms, and communications related to their leave and accommodations.
The Packet Generator can automatically dispatch forms like the FMLA Notice of Eligibility and Rights & Responsibilities (Form WH-381) — something HR needs to hand out every time an employee asks for FMLA leave. Our platform automatically updates these forms as legislation changes, so everything you need is generated instantly and accurately, cutting down on manual labor and turnaround time.
Modern, Convenient Self-Service Portals
Today’s employees expect a modern, technology-driven experience when requesting leave or accommodations. Submitting a request shouldn’t feel much different than buying a few essentials on Amazon. Self-service portals deliver on this expectation.
AbsenceSoft’s self-service portals allow employees to request leave or accommodations from any device, at any time. This feature is particularly useful for deskless workers; nurses, teachers, and other frontline workers may not have the capacity to sit down at their computer and file a request. The portals also allow employees to review their request status, upload paperwork, submit required documents, and communicate with HR.
How AbsenceSoft Solves HR’s Most Pressing Problems
Because our platform is built by people with real-world leave expertise, it delivers what HR leaders truly need on the job. The AbsenceSoft platform provides:
- Integration with core systems: AbsenceSoft connects seamlessly with payroll, HRIS and HCM systems like ADP, Workday, and UKG. These integrations make sure every HR system is based on an accurate source of truth regarding any employee information — start dates, job codes, worksites, and more.
- Visibility: Real-time dashboards show who’s out, when they’re returning, and what’s pending. Because it takes only one click for HR and managers to know the status of each employee, stakeholders stay aligned and up to date.
- Scalability: Our platform is ideal for organizations operating in many locations, incorporating many roles, and offering many policies. Got a fully or partially distributed team? No problem. AbsenceSoft enables all kinds of work arrangements, from fully remote to completely in-person, and everything in between.
- Intelligent automation: AbsenceSoft takes a smart approach to AI and automation. Our workflows reduce reliance on HR memory, email reminders, and manual workarounds. We understand the right blend of human and technology to save the most time and ensure compliance, so we have included plenty of opportunities for human review and personalization.
HR’s Most Common Frustrations, and How AbsenceSoft Solves Them
At AbsenceSoft, we anticipated the frustrations HR teams commonly experience with their technology and built solutions that answer to those problems into our platform.
Manual Handoffs Between Systems
Seamless integrations sync employee data and leave status automatically. When you integrate AbsenceSoft with your HRIS or HCM, for example, you can power real-time insights into your leave program with up-to-date information about your workforce.
Inconsistent Documentation and Response Times
Inconsistent processes can lead to consequences ranging from cultural repercussions to legal action. The ACE Packet Generator and other workflows ensure your team follows the same steps, on time, every time — and never forgets to document them.
Missed Compliance Deadlines
Our platform enables proactive alerts, automated eligibility checks, and instant entitlement calculations. These systems ensure no deadline goes unnoticed and no mistake goes unchecked.
Confusing Processes
A lack of clarity can create confusion, frustration, and serious mistakes. Self-service portals offer a single accessible destination for employees and clear visibility for frontline managers. Meanwhile, text messaging enables and incentivizes quick communication.
Self-Service That Actually Reduces Workload
Let’s get specific about how one of AbsenceSoft’s most popular features benefit HR teams, employees, and organizations at large. Our self-service portals streamline the intaking process. They give employees a singular, clear destination for all of their leave and accommodation requests, eliminating the flurry of emails and instant messages that often accompanies intaking.
Instead, employees know to take their requests, documents, and questions to the self-service portal. They don’t need to call or email HR or their manager. They can simply log onto AbsenceSoft on their computer, tablet, or phone. Mobile access is key: it means fewer delays, faster uploads, and higher response rates.
As beneficial as the portal is to employees, it’s almost more beneficial to managers and HR. Managers can use the portal to view upcoming leave schedules and check in on accommodations. Their access improves planning and reduces scheduling surprises, which is crucial in industries where staffing ratios must be maintained.
For HR, the self-service portal is transformative because it prompts employees to give all the information the team needs to process a request. There’s no back-and-forth communication over email or Slack. There’s also no lost paperwork or documentation. It’s all right there in one centralized location.
Reporting That Increases Insights, Not Workload
HR professionals know they need to use data to evidence their output to company leadership. AbsenceSoft makes reporting easy with case status, workload, and compliance tracking all in one dashboard.
Our platform also generates custom reports. These provide insights into trends, bottlenecks, and performance, so you can highlight your wins with a few clicks.
Spotlighting Success: Before working with AbsenceSoft, the leave management team at Purdue University spent five to six hours getting the data it needed for monthly reports. With the AbsenceSoft platform, however, the team spends only 15 minutes to get the data it needs.
How to Find a Solution That Modernizes Leave and Accommodations
The search for the right solution can be overwhelming. Here’s a checklist of features to look for:
- Intelligent automated compliance tracking for 200+ federal and state laws
- Guided workflows with critical human touchpoints
- Self-service and mobile-first design
- The ability to configure custom policies alongside state and federal laws
- Clear reporting and clean data outputs for analytics or AI use
If you’d like to learn how AbsenceSoft delivers on these features and more, book a demo today.