Employee Self Service · Daily operations · 7 min read

Decide what is waiting for you as a manager

Approve or reject leave, corrections, overtime, timesheets, requests and, for HR and finance, their steps.

Before you begin

• You are a line manager (people report to you in HR), or you hold HR or finance approval rights.
• You hold the approval permission for the kind of item. Without it you are not an approver for that kind.
• You can decide only items from your own team. An item of someone else's team answers 'Record not found.' (or 'That timesheet is not your team's.').

Open the queue

1. Open Employee Self Service > Configuration > All Approvals. The tabs are All, Leave, Corrections, Overtime and Timesheets. Items are sorted oldest first.
2. Or use the specific menu under Manager: Leave Approvals, Attendance Corrections, Overtime Approvals, Timesheet Approvals.

Each card shows the type, employee, reference, dates and amount. A leave card also shows Balance after (balance minus the days asked) and who else in the team is away on those dates. A timesheet card shows, for example, 'Week of 28 Sep - 38 h' with the entries. HR and finance see their own steps, expense claims, profile changes and document renewals in the same queue.

Approve

1. Read the card.
2. Click Approve.
3. Add a note if useful and confirm.

Reject

1. Click Reject.
2. Type the reason. It is mandatory.
3. Confirm.

The messages for an empty reason are 'Say why it is rejected.' (requests), 'Say why it was refused.' (leave) and 'Say what needs correcting.' (timesheets).

What happens next

• Leave. Approved: the employee is notified and the days move to Scheduled. Rejected: the state is Rejected with your note.
• Correction. The request moves to the next step, usually HR Review. At the last approval the system adds a correction punch.
• Overtime. Approving approves the day's overtime up to the hours requested, never more than the attendance record found.
• Timesheet. Approving makes every submitted entry of that week Approved. Rejecting returns the entries to the employee as Rejected with your note.
• Other requests. Each approval moves to the next step in the workflow. The last approval applies the effect, for example creating a loan. The employee gets a decision notice.

Rules that refuse

• Nobody decides their own work. You cannot decide your own request ('You cannot decide your own request.'), your own leave ('A different HR user must decide this leave request.'), your own leave cancellation ('A different manager must decide this request.'), your own expense claim ('A different approver must decide your own claim.') or your own profile change ('A different HR user must decide this request.'). These items never show in your own queue.
• Only the approver of the current step can decide: 'This step is not yours to decide.' A request not waiting: 'This request is not waiting for a decision.'
• If someone else decided first: 'This request changed. Reload before deciding.' or 'This claim changed. Reload before deciding.' Reload and look again.
• A profile change is refused if the employee record changed after the request: 'The employee profile changed after this request was sent. Reject it and ask the employee to submit the current values again.'

Good to know

• Anyone who holds expense-approval rights sees all submitted expense claims of the company in the queue, not only their team's.
• If the manager of an employee has no login, the manager step goes to the workspace administrators.
• Items for HR (profile changes, renewals) need the HR private data permission.