Spokane-based employer consulting and legal services group Associated Industries has launched a new leave management service for its members. 

The organization has been developing LeaveAdmin for about a year, says Katie Bechtol, LeaveAdmin service lead and Associated Industries senior human resources adviser. 

Leave management isn’t new to Associated Industries, she says, as the association has provided comprehensive human resources services for years. Now, however, leave management will be offered as a separate service.

“This isn’t new to our scope of work. We just haven’t done this as an independent service,” Bechtol says. “We’ve continually been getting feedback from our member base that they need this.”

Implementing LeaveAdmin for a member takes about a month, Bechtol says, during which time Associated Industries reviews the company’s current leave policies and systems, meets with leadership and payroll, and updates the employee handbook. 

LeaveAdmin uses the expertise of Associated Industries’ human resources professionals combined with a leave management software called AbsenceSoft to manage the entire leave process. 

Bechtol says the process begins when an employee files a leave of absence claim. Then someone at LeaveAdmin contacts the employee to inform them of their rights, company policy, and what obligations the company has in the process. 

“We report back to management or payroll or whoever internally needs to know what’s going on,” Bechtol says. “We facilitate the full paperwork process, all the documentation, the medical certification.”

LeaveAdmin pricing is calculated on a per-employee, per-month basis through a bundle pricing model. It’s available exclusively to Associated Industries members. 

Bechtol says part of the reason for developing LeaveAdmin lies in how leave management is often administered by companies. 

“What we realized is that a lot of members tried to develop their own homegrown systems, and those are usually very manual processes,” Bechtol says. 

Other companies that do have dedicated human resources employees often use those employees to fill multiple roles, Bechtol says. 

“The challenge is, they don’t live in this world day in and day out,” Bechtol says. 

Bechtol says the service is already being used by one organization that has about 600 employees. She declines to identify the employer.