Manage your team's leave

What this guide covers

Everything a manager does for the people in their management chain: approving, rejecting, creating leave for an employee, handling a cancellation request, and the approver and stand-in rules that decide whose decision counts.

The matching employee guide is My Leave: apply, edit, cancel and return early. For status-badge meanings see Leave request statuses field definitions. The inbox itself is described in Pending Approvals.

The approver rule (the one rule that explains everything)

Every leave, custom-schedule (OT) and OT-cancellation request becomes one approval card addressed to one current approver — normally the employee's direct manager, or that manager's stand-in. Only the current approver sees the card in their queue and can decide it.

If the current approver does nothing for two fully elapsed working days — counted on the approver's own schedule, so weekends, off-days and public holidays never count against them — the card escalates automatically to the next manager up the employee's chain, the clock restarts, and a note "Escalated — no decision after 2 working days" is posted on the request. When there is no higher manager, the card is marked exhausted and stays with the last approver.

This is intentional. It means:

• A direct manager who is on leave or unreachable does not block their team for long.
• A senior manager is pulled in by the system when needed, without asking for a handover.
• Decisions are not a race. Nobody else can act on a card while it sits with you, so "who approved this?" always has one clear answer.

HR Admins, HR Readers and Site Admins can see and action everyone's pending cards, which is how HR sweeps up at month end.

Stand-in managers

When you apply for leave, the form requires you to pick a Stand-in Manager from your scope (the people you manage or peers you trust). The system writes that person into your department's tempManager slot for the start date of your leave. While you are off, any leave or OT request from your team that would normally route to you routes to the stand-in instead.

Stand-in is set per department, per date — it covers the day your leave begins. If your team submits a request days after you go on leave, the stand-in still picks it up because the routing walks via the temp-manager flag.

When you come back, the temp-manager flag clears and your normal routing resumes.

The Pending Approvals page

The My Stuff menu no longer exists. Open the Approvals inbox from the Dashboard (the Pending Approvals card on the Action Items tab, or the Management Portal tile), or from the chat notification that arrives with each new card. The page is described in full in Pending Approvals; the leave-relevant parts are:

• Two tabs: Pending (with a count) and History.
• A row of type chips — All plus one chip per type present in your queue (Leave, Leave Edit, Leave Cancellation, Custom Schedule, OT Cancellation, and so on) with counts — so you can look at one kind at a time.
• Cards grouped by type. Your own requests sit under My requests; things only you can accept (for example an assigned shift) sit under Awaiting my action.
• Selecting a card opens its detail on the right with the decision bar underneath. When everything is clear you see the all-caught-up empty state.

Watch for split rows. When an employee asks for more days than they have available, the system splits the request into a paid row + an Unpaid row (linked, same start/end dates, same employee). They show up as two cards in your queue. You can decide on each independently — see "Override the unpaid split with a negative balance" below.

Approving or rejecting a leave request

Select the card. The decision bar has a comment box ("Comment (required when rejecting)") and two buttons: Reject and Approve.

Approving

Optionally type a comment, then click Approve.

What happens:

• Status flips to APPROVED.
• The employee's balance is deducted for that leave type — first from the carry-over bucket, then from the current cycle balance. Balances can go negative if you are explicitly allowing that (see split-handling below).
• Attendance is marked accordingly so daily-attendance scans no longer flag the employee as absent on those days.
• A chat notification fires to the employee.

Rejecting

Reject requires a comment — the employee needs actionable feedback so they know whether to refile, change dates, or escalate.

What happens:

• Status flips to REJECTED. No balance is deducted.
• The employee gets the rejection notification with your reason.
• If the request was a paid + unpaid split, the linked unpaid row is auto-rejected with the comment "Auto-rejected: linked annual leave request was rejected" — it does not make sense to keep half of a split alive.

Acknowledge-only leave

Some leave types are configured by HR as "Manager acknowledges — leave is effective immediately" (typically sick leave). Those requests are recorded the moment the employee submits them; the card in your queue shows a notice ("This leave is already recorded — your manager will acknowledge the notice") and a single Acknowledge button. There is nothing to reject and these cards do not escalate.

Approving an EDIT_PENDING request

When an employee edits an already-approved leave request, you receive a separate Leave Edit card tied to the same employee. The original stays visible but is locked (you cannot edit-on-edit) and shows status EDIT_PENDING.

• Approve the edit → the original days are refunded to the employee's balance, the original goes to CANCELLED, the new request goes to APPROVED, and attendance is recalculated for the new dates.
• Reject the edit → the edited request goes to EDIT_REJECTED and the original stays approved exactly as it was.

This is why you should treat an edit as "approve a new request" rather than "approve a small change" — the approve action does the full bookkeeping for both rows.

Approving a cancellation (CANCEL_PENDING)

When an employee asks to cancel a leave that you previously approved, the cancellation needs your approval too — even if it is well before the start date. The flow exists so an employee cannot quietly retract a leave they were approved for and dodge the audit trail.

The original APPROVED row stays visible in their history but flips to CANCEL_PENDING. A Leave Cancellation card lands in your queue with the cancellation reason. The buttons read Approve cancellation / Reject cancellation.

• Approve the cancellation — the original goes to CANCELLED, the balance is refunded, attendance is reversed.
• Reject the cancellation — the original stays APPROVED, the leave still happens. The employee gets a notification with your reason.

Approving custom schedule (OT) and OT cancellations

Custom Schedule cards show the date, requested start and end times, minutes and the employee's reason. Approve takes an optional comment; Reject requires one. Approving a custom schedule authorises the employee's hours for that day — they count toward the weekly hours, and any authorised hours beyond the weekly contract are paid as overtime, subject to the weekly cap.

For OT Cancellation cards the buttons read Approve cancellation / Reject cancellation — rejecting a cancellation means "the OT must still happen", so make sure that is actually what you mean. The reason on a reject is required precisely because rejecting a cancellation is a decision the employee needs to push back against if it is not feasible.

You can also counter-propose different times: on the My Leave page, managers have a Pending Approvals tab listing Pending Custom Schedule Requests. Click Review on a request and then Counter-Propose to open the Propose Alternative Times dialog (new start and end times plus a required reason). The employee accepts or rejects your times from the Manager Counter-Proposed Times — Action Required panel on My Schedule › Custom Schedules, and the card on the Approvals inbox shows "Counter-proposal sent" until they do.

Override the unpaid split with a negative balance

When a request comes in as a paid + unpaid split (because the employee asked for more days than they had), you have three options:

• Approve both rows as-is — the employee gets paid days for what they had, and unpaid days for the rest. Standard outcome.
• Reject both — the employee has to refile with a shorter request or a different type. Auto-rejection of the linked row keeps things clean.
• Override the unpaid row to a negative balance — instead of treating the shortfall as unpaid, debit it against the same leave type. The next monthly accrual will pay it back. This is the right call when you trust the employee and the shortfall is small. Use this carefully — it lets the balance go negative on the books.

The "convert unpaid to negative" path is on the unpaid row's dialog (look for Allow negative balance or similar). Once you submit, the unpaid row vanishes from pending, the primary row is approved, and the leave-type's balance shows a negative figure until the next accrual catches up.

Create leave on an employee's behalf

Sometimes an employee cannot file (off sick, no system access, on the road). Open Create leave for an employee from the Management Portal (it also opens from the Apply leave button on an employee's stats page). It has its own guide: Create leave for an employee.

In short: pick the employee, then the leave type, duration and dates (for Days you enter the Last Day of Leave, not the return date). The request is auto-approved as you submit — no second approval is needed because you, the manager, are submitting it.

When the request would exceed the employee's balance, you choose at submit time:

• Split to unpaid — the same paid + unpaid split gets created and both rows are auto-approved.
• Allow negative balance — the primary leave type takes a negative balance.

A Manager Note is required and is recorded against the request so HR can see why it was created on-behalf.

Reading the inbox: what to look at on each card

For a leave card, glance at:

• Type — does this match what you would expect for this employee? Sick + Monday + no certificate is worth a quick chat. A Certificate REQUIRED chip means the BCEA sick-note rule applies.
• Days — sanity check the number against your team's headcount and current workload.
• Reason — the employee's own reason, useful colour for borderline cases.
• Waiting — how long the card has been sitting. Cards that have waited long enough to escalate say so.

For a Custom Schedule card:

• Minutes — total minutes requested. Combined with the date, this tells you whether someone is heading past the weekly overtime cap (in which case the excess will not be paid anyway).
• Reason — was this asked for, or is the employee unilaterally proposing it?

For an OT Cancellation card:

• Date — the originally approved OT date. If it is the day-of, ask whether the work was actually done before approving the cancel.

Notifications fired (so you know what your team will see)

The notification service fires a chat message and an email at every state change:

• SUBMITTED — employee submitted; the current approver (or the stand-in, if assigned) is notified.
• SPLIT_SUBMITTED — the system created a paid + unpaid split.
• APPROVED / REJECTED — your decision, with your comment if you wrote one.
• CANCEL_REQUESTED / CANCEL_APPROVED / CANCEL_REJECTED — for the cancellation flow.
• EDIT_SUBMITTED / EDIT_APPROVED / EDIT_REJECTED — for the edit flow.
• MANAGER_CREATED / MANAGER_AUTO_APPROVED / MANAGER_BALANCE_OVERRIDE — when a manager files on behalf, auto-approves on file, or converts unpaid to a negative balance.

If your employee mentions they did not get a notification, check that they have a chat / email subscription against attendance events.

Tips and gotchas

• Decide within two working days. After that the card leaves your queue and lands with your manager, and the escalation is recorded on the request.
• A reason is mandatory on every reject (leave, OT, OT-cancel) so the employee always has something to act on.
• If a card you expected is not in your queue, you are probably not the current approver for that person — a sub-department with its own active manager takes those people out of your queue, and a stand-in takes them while you are on leave.
• A manager-created and auto-approved request still routes through the same notification fan-out, so HR sees it in their reports without any extra plumbing.
• HR Admins, HR Readers and Site Admins see everyone's pending items, not just their chain — useful for HR sweep-up at month end.