How does OOO time impact Cost Capitalization?
Last updated: October 27, 2026
When your organization sets an out-of-office (OOO) source, Span leaves a person's OOO days out of the effort it infers for Cost Capitalization. A day is either OOO or it isn't; Span has no partial OOO days.
Why it matters
Someone on vacation can still merge a pull request from a phone. Without an OOO source, Span counts that day as a working day on the merged work. With an OOO source, Span leaves the whole day out, so time off doesn't add effort or cost to your capitalized projects.
How it works
Span marks OOO days. Each person-day is flagged OOO or not, from the one source your organization picks: your calendar integration or your HRIS. The flag covers the whole day.
Span infers effort. For each day a person shows activity (commits, pull requests, reviews, issue updates), Span splits that day across the work they touched. The unit is the FTE-day: one person's full working day.
Span drops OOO days before it classifies work. When an OOO source is set, every FTE-day that falls on that person's OOO day is removed before Span sorts the work into Capitalized, Uncapitalized and the other categories. That day's activity adds nothing to any project.
Cost follows the remaining FTE-days. Cost is
salary ÷ 260 × FTE-days. The formula has no separate OOO adjustment. OOO lowers cost only because OOO days carry no FTE-days.
OOO and excluded work are separate. The exclusion setting decides what happens to work Span can't place: a pull request with no linked issue, an issue with no epic, or work dated outside a project's window. It never applies to OOO days, and Span never redistributes OOO days onto other work.
With manager-approved effort. If your organization uses human-approved effort instead of Span's inferred effort, managers record time off themselves as an Out of Office row when they review each cycle. The approved numbers replace Span's inference.
Setup
Go to Settings → Org Calendar.
Under Out of Office Days Source, choose Calendar Integration or HRIS Integration. Each option needs that integration connected first. For an HRIS, you can choose which absence types to include or exclude.
To set how Span handles unlinked or out-of-window work, go to Settings → DevFinOps and use How to handle excluded work. This setting doesn't affect OOO days.
Things to know
No OOO source means no OOO handling: if neither source is set, Span counts every day with activity, including days the person was out.
One source at a time: Span reads OOO days from either your calendar or your HRIS, not both.
Whole days only: with the calendar source, a weekday is OOO only when out-of-office events cover more than 4 hours between 8am and 6pm in the person's time zone. A shorter block leaves a normal day. With the HRIS source, every weekday inside an absence is OOO. Weekends are never OOO.
Calendar availability weighting is a separate setting. If an admin turns on Weight FTE days by calendar availability under Settings → Investment, each active day that isn't OOO shrinks by its calendar time, meetings and out-of-office blocks of any length:
(8 − calendar hours) ÷ 8, with a minimum of 0.1 FTE-days. A day that is OOO is still dropped entirely.Days with no activity already carry no effort: an OOO day changes your numbers only when the person also had activity that day.
OOO days don't count as excluded work: the exclusion setting and redistribution never touch them.
Worked example: an engineer earns $130,000 a year, so one FTE-day costs $130,000 ÷ 260 = $500. In one week she works Monday to Wednesday on a capitalized epic, then takes Thursday and Friday off, both recorded in your HRIS. She has no activity on Thursday. On Friday she merges a pull request from her phone.
With no OOO source set, Span counts Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday: 4 FTE-days, or $2,000 of capitalized cost.
With the HRIS set as the OOO source, Span drops Friday: 3 FTE-days, or $1,500. Thursday counts as zero either way, because she had no activity.
With the calendar as the OOO source and only a 9am to 12pm out-of-office block on Friday, Friday isn't OOO (3 hours), so it counts as 1 FTE-day ($500). With calendar availability weighting on and no meetings that day, it counts as (8 − 3) ÷ 8 = 0.625 FTE-days ($312.50).
If Wednesday's pull request had no linked issue, the exclusion setting would decide where that day goes. With the default, Redistribute where possible, otherwise show as Uncapitalized, and redistribution by day, Wednesday has no other work to move to, so it shows as Uncapitalized. Set redistribution to by week and Span moves it onto her Monday and Tuesday epic work. Friday stays out in every case.
This article explains how Span calculates effort. Talk to your finance and accounting advisors about how to treat time off in your capitalization policy.
Related articles
Introduction to Cost Capitalization
Connecting an OOO Data Source in Span
Understanding Developer Days and Developer Months in Cost Capitalization Reports
Need help?
Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.