HOLCOUP: The Virtual Leave Card Is Born

I built the leave card inside the AS/400 as a database record. The attendance system could issue it, assign its use date, invalidate it when necessary, and preserve the history.

I named the file HOLCOUP: HOL for holiday, COUP for coupon. It was a database of leave coupons.

• Employee code
• Leave code
• Allocation date
• Validity start date
• Validity end date
• Use date
• Use portion: full day, first half, or second half
• The date or event that justified the allocation

Because half-day leave was permitted, one record represented half a day of entitlement. An employee with twenty unused paid-leave days therefore held forty unused coupon records.

It may sound obvious once described. At the time, it was the essential step that turned a complicated real-world right into data the AS/400 could manage transparently.