We are currently planning to acquire a better leave management software. I am ashamed to admit that we are still doing leave management MANUALLY. Our manager has argued that a lot of manpower hours and a lot of efficiency could be gained by having a software to do these!

You should have your programmers do it in-house. This way you could tailor it the way you want it. Plus it would be robust enough to include other aspects of HR that you might want to automate We use an in-house system, so I really couldn't help you here.

Go to the clouds, my manager would say. So we did.. take a look at leavemaster.com, you would be surprised at how easy it is to use and very convenient too!

We use iLeave, and it takes care of time and attendance, leaves and a lot of timekeeping functions. It also easily exports to Quickbooks so you can easily do payroll. There is a free trial for it if you want to test it.

This is what we use, check it out:
http://www.iqdynamics.com/Public/HRM_HRiQ_Leave_Management.aspx

We use leavemaster.com too. I agree it's very user friendly that we didn't have any problems with it!

Would you happen to have any free software?

We were looking into various programs before deciding to do it in-house, but this was one of the best we were looking at at the time:
http://www.perqworks.com/

We use this: http://www.justlogin.com/leave-management-software/

Ugh. Remember, you get what you pay for And I really won't trust any free software with HR functions