Requesting and Approving Holiday as a Manager

Requesting Holiday

In this article, we will discuss how to request a holiday and how to approve one as a manager. 

Step 1

The first step is to go to First, go to the profile of the staff member you want to add a holiday request for.  Under the actions bar, click to add a holiday request.

The screen will now ask for broad information about the request. Is it less than a day? A single day? Or a longer period? 

This allows the system to offer further options specific to the requested dates, making part-day and half-day requests much easier to enter. You can specify whether this will be in the morning or the afternoon. The time can be as specific as the hours that the staff member will be leaving and returning to work.

The process will consider the staff member’s specific contract configuration and offer relevant options. For example, a staff member who is only allowed to book half or whole days will have options limited to those choices.

Step 2

Once you have specified the period of time that the staff member will be away from work, you can also include a reason for their absence. You can also set if this is a repeatable absence and include an end date for the repeated absence. For example, if a staff member is completing a course, that means they will be absent for half a day every week for four months.

Once you have decided on the details of your absence, you can send the request. Within these settings, you can choose whether to approve the request immediately.

Step 3 

Approving Holiday

Once any staff member or manager has submitted a request, it will appear as a holiday request needing approval on a manager's dashboard. Holiday Requests needing approval can also be viewed via Reports > Staff Reports > Holiday Approval. Then, you can choose whether to approve or reject a shift. You will see you have the information about how much holiday has already been booked, how this will affect skills and whether this affects any scheduled shifts.

Managers can also choose the order in which they view all holiday requests they must approve. The default is in order of start date, but you can also choose the oldest request first and several other options, including name, length, and end date.

Tentative Approval

When approving a holiday, if the staff member has shifts and they are not cancelled or reposted for cover* (so the shifts remain assigned to them), then their holiday will be marked as tentatively approved.

It will automatically change to 'approved' when they find cover for those shifts.

(If a holiday is cancelled, it will then restore any regular repeating shifts that were cancelled for the holiday. This will restore their previous regular repeating shift pattern.)

*Shifts can also be offered to staff rather than automatically becoming extra shifts. Please note this change can be made by a manager.