Role-based Leave Management System Using Spring Boot and RESTful Architecture

Traditional leave management processes in academic and corporate institutions continue to suffer from inefficiencies caused by paper-based workflows, weak validation, inconsistent leave balance tracking, and limited system integration. Although several web-based solutions exist, many lack transactional consistency, enforce minimal business rules, or fail to follow modular architectural principles. This paper presents the design and implementation of a role-based Employee Leave Management System developed using Spring Boot and RESTful architectural principles. The system follows a layered architecture separating controller, service, repository, and data transfer con- cerns to improve maintainability and extensibility. Core business rules— including non-overlapping leave validation, balance sufficiency checks, controlled status transitions, and role restricted operations—are enforced at the service layer with declarative transaction man- agement ensuring atomicity and data consistency. A key design decision defers leave balance deduction until managerial approval rather than request submission, preventing balance inconsistencies for rejected requests. Functional validation confirms correct enforcement of business rules and transactional behavior across common and edge-case scenarios. The proposed system demonstrates how structured architectural design and transaction-aware workflows can address limitations observed in existing leave management solutions and provides a foundation for further enhancement toward production-ready HR system integration.