Approve annual leave and time-off requests

Employees submit two different kinds of time off from My Requests:

• Request Leave or Request Off — time off for dates they choose, which is not annual holiday.
• Holiday — annual leave for a date range.

Both are decided in the Request Centre, and both can leave a gap in the roster that you have to fill.

The employee enters a start and end date, an optional supporting document and notes. The end date must be on or after the start date, the start date cannot be in the past, and they can submit for dates when they have no scheduled shift.

While the request is pending, the employee stays on the live roster and nothing changes.

When you approve:

• If the employee has no shifts in that period, a leave record is created and the roster is unchanged.
• If the employee has shifts in that period, those shift rows stay on the roster but are marked absent.
• An absent employee no longer counts towards the staffing requirement, so Worker Missing is created where the requirement is no longer met.
• The shift type and date remain visible, and live and draft both update immediately.
• No replacement is assigned automatically, so you must arrange cover.

The employee enters a start date, an end date and optional notes. Checks may include department assignment and daily holiday capacity, so submission can be blocked when a day is already full.

Before approving, check the dates, which scheduled shifts are affected, department staffing and holiday limits, and any conflicting pending requests.

When you approve:

• A holiday record is created.
• The employee's live and draft shift rows for those dates are removed.
• Worker Missing appears where the department still requires that shift type on those dates.
• The live roster updates immediately, with no republish required.
• No replacement is assigned automatically.

Holiday capacity is checked again at the moment you approve, so an approval can fail if the day filled up after the employee submitted.

Request Leave keeps the shift row and marks the worker absent. Holiday removes the worker's shift row entirely. Both can create Worker Missing when staffing falls below the requirement.

After either is approved, automatic schedule generation excludes that employee for the approved dates. They become available again once the absence ends, and you should always review generated schedules after approving an absence.

A normal publish can be blocked when there are pending shift swaps, leave requests or holidays for that department and week. Resolve them first where you can.

If you must publish anyway, the force option rebuilds the live week from the draft and expires the pending requests:

• Pending shift swaps, leave requests and holidays may expire.
• Extra availability requests do not expire.
• Expired requests were not applied and cannot later be approved.

Expired requests carry a badge showing that they expired because the schedule was republished, so nobody mistakes it for a manager decision.

There is no email, no push notification and no separate in-app alert. The message appears when the employee next opens My Requests, explaining that the request expired because the schedule was republished and asking them to submit a new one if they still need the change.

The details view can show when that message was first displayed. That timestamp is not proof the employee read or understood it, so contact them directly when confirmation matters.