How leave approval works
When an employee submits a leave request, it enters a Pending state and is queued for review. No leave balance is deducted until the request is approved. A reviewer with approval rights (HR Manager, Admin) then either approves the request or rejects it with a reason. Octal HR uses a single review step — there are no multi-level approval chains or auto-approval.
Leave status lifecycle:
When a request is approved, the requested days are deducted from the employee's leave balance for that leave type. If a request is later rejected or cancelled, the days are restored.
Approval flow
Employee submits request
From the portal: selects a leave type, start date, end date, and adds a reason. The request is created in the Pending state and no balance is deducted yet.
HR / manager reviews the request
A reviewer with approval rights opens the request from the leave queue, sees the employee, leave type, dates and reason, and decides to approve or reject it.
Decision applied
On approval, the request is marked Approved and the days are deducted from the employee's balance. On rejection, the request is marked Rejected with the reason recorded and no balance is consumed.
Approving and rejecting requests
Reviewers open the leave queue from Leave in the main menu, then open an individual request to act on it. For each pending request you can:
- See the employee, leave type, date range, day count, and the reason they entered
- Approve the request — the request becomes Approved and the days are deducted from the employee's balance
- Reject the request with a mandatory reason (a rejection without a reason is not allowed); the reason is stored and visible on the request
Approval and rejection are restricted to users with the leave approval permission (HR Manager, Admin, and Super Admin roles). Employees and view-only users can submit and view requests but cannot approve them.
Leave cancellation
A leave request can be cancelled while it is still Pending or after it has been Approved:
- Pending request: No balance was deducted, so cancelling simply marks the request Cancelled.
- Approved request: When an approved request is cancelled, the deducted days are restored to the employee's balance.
HR/managers can cancel a request from the request page. Employees can cancel their own request from the self-service portal while it is still Pending.