---
title: Negative Balances at Year End
description: "If PTO is accrued regularly, employers can require that any negative balance must be earned back by the end of the year, allowing employees to use their annual allotment without exceeding it. Alternatively, employees may be permitted to use more time off than they have earned, resulting in a negative balance that carries over into the next year. If an organization wishes to \"forgive\" a negative balance, an administrator must manually adjust the balance after it has carried over to offset the negative amount."
---
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# Negative Balances at Year End
## For customers of our PTO module.
If you allow people's PTO accounts to have a negative balance, you might be wondering what happens to that negative balance at year-end. There are two possible outcomes:
First, if your time off is earned via regularly scheduled accruals, you can choose to require that a negative balance must be earned back by year's end. With this setting in place, you're essentially letting employees use their annual amount prior to earning it, but preventing them from using more than their annual allotment.
The other option for negative balances is to allow a person to actually use more time off than they have earned or will earn in the current year. In this case, the person will finish the year with a negative balance.
Negative balances at year-end always carry over to the next year. If you want to "forgive" a negative balance, an administrator would need to manually do a balance adjustment after the negative amount has carried over. This manual entry would then offset the negative amount.
Please contact our Customer Success Team for additional assistance.
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