If you run a small business, leave hours can feel like a soft topic, nice to have, not urgent. Until it becomes very urgent. Because leave is not only time off; it’s a promise you’ve already made. It sits in the background of your payroll, your planning, your customer commitments, and your admin load. When leave balances grow without a clear rhythm, the risk doesn’t show up as a headline. It shows up as a sudden staffing gap, a tense conversation, or a payout you hadn’t budgeted for.

Here’s the simple reality: employees don’t “ask” for leave hours; they earn them as they work. In the Netherlands, the legal minimum holiday entitlement is tied to working time. Full-time employees build up at least four times their weekly working hours per year (so if someone works 40 hours a week, they earn at least 160 hours of statutory leave annually). Part-timers build up proportionally. On top of that, many contracts and collective labour agreements add extra “bovenwettelijke” (above-statutory) days. That Dutch word matters because it often comes with different rules, and if you don’t separate the two in your records, you’ll eventually argue about the wrong pile of hours.

Those hours accumulate steadily, but the moments when they are used are lumpy. You feel that in a micro-business. A designer who keeps postponing holidays because “we’re busy” may look loyal, but what you are really collecting is a future bottleneck. The work doesn’t disappear when the leave is finally taken. It moves. Your client deadlines compress, your own weekends get eaten, and the relationship can sour when the employee realises they’ve been carrying a balance for months. Leave is part rest, part retention: when people can’t take it, performance and trust quietly erode.

Then there’s the financial side, which small businesses often underestimate because it doesn’t look like a bill, until it is. Unused leave is a liability. If employment ends, unused statutory leave must be paid out. Even without an exit, large balances create “hidden” payroll exposure: you’re effectively sitting on paid time that still needs to be taken or paid. And if your time registration is messy, hours not recorded properly, overtime casually rolled into leave, approval emails scattered, your risk isn’t only money. It’s uncertainty, which is always expensive.

The good news is that you don’t need a complicated system to manage this well; you need a predictable one. Make leave accrual visible on payslips or in a simple tracker, and treat statutory and above-statutory hours as separate buckets from the start. Put the rules in writing in plain language: how requests are made, how far ahead you plan, what happens with school holidays, what “busy periods” really mean. Most importantly, don’t reward postponing leave. Encourage employees to take it throughout the year, not as a dramatic exhale at the end. When you plan leave early, you protect cash flow, continuity, and goodwill all at once.

Leave hours will always build up, that’s the point. The calm, practical win is to stop letting them build up silently. A short monthly check-in, a clear separation of statutory versus extra hours, and a habit of planning time off before the calendar fills up can prevent the two classic small-business surprises: the sudden absence you can’t cover, and the payout you didn’t see coming. In a company of five people, those aren’t “HR issues.” They’re operational reality, and they’re manageable when you face them early, without drama.