Leave

Leave covers everything from an employee tapping Apply for leave to HR closing the leave year and rolling unused days forward. Find it under Leave in the sidebar.

What you see in that sidebar group depends on your permissions:

Item	Who sees it
Dashboard	Leave admins
My leave	Everyone
Approvals	Everyone (empty unless something is waiting on you)
Batch operations	Leave admins
Reports	Leave admins
Settings	Leave admins, and workflow managers

Who can do what

There are only two leave permissions, and understanding them explains most of what you can and can’t see.

• Everyone can apply for their own leave, see their own balances, withdraw a request before it’s approved, and request cancellation of their own approved upcoming leave.
• Approvers — usually line managers — hold neither permission. They can act on a request only because the approval workflow routed it to them. Their inbox shows only what is currently assigned to them, and they can’t see anyone’s balances.
• Leave admins (leave.admin) configure everything: leave types, entitlement policies, holidays, blackouts, department caps, and year-end closings. They can also file leave on someone’s behalf, adjust balances, grant off-in-lieu, shorten an approved leave, cancel someone’s leave for them, and run the reports. They cannot approve or reject.
• Blanket approvers (leave.approve_all) can act on any leave request in the organization, not just the ones routed to them, and see the whole org’s pending and decided queues. They also receive any approval that ends up with nobody assigned — if every approver on a step has left, it lands with them. They cannot configure anything.
• Leave viewers (leave.read_all) can see anyone’s leave and its attachments, plus the leave dashboard and both reports — and nothing else. No approving, no configuring, no cancelling. Useful for a manager or auditor who needs visibility without authority.

Read access comes with the other two: you can’t decide on, or change, a request you can’t open. So leave.read_all only needs granting on its own, for a view-only role.

The one thing visibility does not unlock is the org-wide approvals inbox. That stays with leave.approve_all, because it’s a queue of decisions to make rather than records to read — a leave admin or viewer sees every request through the reports and the request page, but isn’t handed a worklist they have no authority to action.

The bundled HR admin role holds leave.admin and leave.approve_all (and so reads everything). The employee role holds none of the three.

Caution

Nobody can approve their own leave — not even someone with blanket approval rights. On your own request the only actions available to you are Withdraw and commenting.

The shape of a request

Every leave request moves through a small set of statuses:

Status	What it means
Pending	Submitted, waiting on an approver. The days are held against your balance.
Returned	An approver sent it back for you to fix. The days stay held while you edit.
Approved	Confirmed. The days have moved from pending to used.
Cancellation pending	You asked to cancel approved leave and that cancellation is itself awaiting approval.
Rejected	An approver turned it down. The hold is released.
Cancelled	The leave was called off after approval. The days are returned to your balance.
Withdrawn	You pulled it back before a decision. The hold is released.

There is no draft state — submitting sends the request straight into approval. If something needs changing, an approver returns it to you rather than you saving a half-finished request.

Guides

For everyone

Apply for leaveFill in the request form, book half-days, attach a certificate, and read the warnings before you submit.

Balances and entitlementWhat entitled, accrued, carried, used, pending and available each mean — and off-in-lieu grants.

Change or cancel leaveWithdraw, cancel, fix a returned request, and update who's covering for you.

For approvers

Approving leaveWork the inbox, approve, reject, return for edit, and check who else is away.

For HR admins

Leave typesCreate a leave type and set its accrual, notice, cancellation and coverage rules.

Entitlement policiesThe scope × tenure matrix that decides how many days each employee gets.

Holidays, blackouts and capsThe public holiday calendar, blackout windows, and per-department concurrent-leave limits.

Approval workflowsBuild the routing that decides who approves what, with branches on leave type and duration.

Managing balancesAdjust, recompute, import historical balances, grant off-in-lieu, run batch operations, and settle a leaver's final leave.

Year-end and carry-forwardClose the leave year, roll unused days forward, and forfeit expired carry.

Dashboard and reportsThe live leave dashboard, the balances report, and the on-leave roster.

A note on dates and time zones

Leave is evaluated on your office’s calendar, not your browser’s. Notice periods, backdating limits and “has this leave already started?” checks all use the time zone configured for your work location, falling back to the organization’s time zone.

If your browser is in a different zone, an amber banner appears on the leave screens telling you which calendar is being used. It’s informational — nothing is wrong.