Frequently asked questions
What Orvella does, how much it costs, how time off and accruals work, what we capture (and what we never do), and how your team's data stays private. Can't find your answer? Start a free workspace and see for yourself.
Orvella is modern leave and HR software for teams that have outgrown spreadsheets. It tracks PTO, sick leave, public holidays for 200+ countries, banked time, approvals, and automatic accruals in one clean, multi-tenant dashboard — with optional desktop time and activity tracking called Orvella Time.
Orvella handles the full time-off lifecycle: employees request leave, managers and admins approve it through configurable workflows, balances accrue automatically, public holidays are applied per country, and a shared team calendar shows coverage. It also offers banked time (TOIL), an org chart, reports and analytics, and an optional desktop app for time and activity tracking.
Orvella is built for small businesses, startups, agencies, remote and distributed teams, and the managers who run them. It works for any team that wants a simple, accurate way to manage time off, holidays, and balances without spreadsheets.
The Orvella HR platform runs in any modern web browser — there is nothing to install for leave management. Orvella Time, the optional time-and-activity tracker, is a lightweight desktop app for Windows and macOS that a company can roll out to staff who clock time.
Orvella is the web HR platform for leave, holidays, approvals, balances, and reporting. Orvella Time is the optional companion desktop app that records work time and activity (active/idle time, app and website usage, and optional screenshots) and feeds it back into the Orvella dashboard. You can use Orvella for leave management without ever using Orvella Time.
Orvella is priced per employee per month. Starter is $4/user/month for small teams getting off spreadsheets, Growth is $7/user/month for scaling teams that need two-level approvals, accruals, banked time, and reports, and Enterprise is custom pricing with SSO/SCIM, custom roles, and priority support.
Yes — Orvella is free to start. You can create a workspace and try it without commitment, billing is per employee per month, and you can cancel anytime.
Billing is per active employee, per month. You only pay for the people in your workspace, and there are no setup fees or long-term contracts.
Orvella accrues leave automatically based on the policy you set — per pay period, per hour worked, or a fixed annual grant — and keeps a running balance for every employee. Carryover and rollover caps are configurable, so unused time can roll into the next year up to a limit you choose.
Yes. Orvella publishes accurate public-holiday calendars for 200+ countries, computed from each country's official rules rather than hand-typed. Holidays are applied per person, so an employee's leave calendar reflects the holidays that actually apply to them.
Banked time, or time off in lieu (TOIL), is time an employee earns by working extra hours that they can later take as leave. Orvella keeps a banked-time ledger so accrued and used hours are always reconciled against the employee's balance.
When an employee submits a request, it routes to their manager for approval, with an optional second step requiring admin/owner sign-off. Approvers see coverage warnings — how many teammates are already off — so they can make informed decisions, and the employee is notified the moment a decision is made.
Managers and admins get a team calendar showing approved and pending leave across the company, with department and location filters. Regular employees see their own time off and the public holidays that apply to them.
Yes. Orvella is multi-tenant SaaS — every company gets its own isolated workspace, and data is never shared between companies. Each workspace is scoped to its own tenant throughout the platform.
No. Regular employees only ever see themselves and the manager they report to — not other employees, not other teams, and not company-wide rosters, calendars, or reports. Managers see their direct reports, and admins/owners manage the whole company. Visibility is enforced by role-based permissions on the server, not just hidden in the UI.
Only if a company chooses to enable Orvella Time, the optional desktop tracker, for a given person — and it is disclosed monitoring that HR controls per employee. When enabled it can capture periodic screenshots and record active/idle time, app and website usage, and keyboard/mouse activity as counts only (it never records what you type). Screenshot frequency and quality are configurable, and tracking can be turned off per person.
Orvella runs on managed cloud infrastructure with encrypted transport (HTTPS) for all traffic. Each tenant's data is logically isolated, and access is gated by per-role permissions.
Orvella Time records clock in/out and work sessions, active vs. idle time, the apps and websites in use, keyboard and mouse activity as counts (not content), and optional periodic screenshots. Everything it captures is surfaced to HR inside the Orvella dashboard.
Orvella Time runs on Windows and macOS. It auto-updates, so once it's installed, clients stay current on their own.
Create a free workspace, invite your team by email, set up your leave types and policies, and you're tracking time off in minutes. Public holidays for your country are applied automatically, so balances and calendars are accurate from day one.
Orvella is not a payroll processor, but it gives payroll everything it needs: accurate leave balances, accruals, banked time, and exportable CSV reports that drop into your existing payroll workflow.
Yes. Managers approve their direct reports' requests, see their team's calendar and balances, and run team-level reports. Admins and owners can do all of that company-wide and configure what managers are allowed to do.
Create a free workspace in minutes. Public holidays, accruals, and approvals work out of the box.
