Ready to set up absence approval policies? If you haven’t yet, start with our Absence Approval Policies guide to learn how to create them.

Once your policies are in place, this guide will help you assign them to employees for smoother absence management.

📌 Note: Absence is currently divided into Time Off and Remote Work categories (in Beta). If you don’t see “Absence Approval Policies” in your settings, your account will be updated soon.
In the meantime, you’ll see Time Off Approval Policies—the functionality is the same.

Setting up absence approval policies is available on the Ultimate subscription plan.

Assigning an Approval Policy

Follow these steps to assign or edit an absence approval policy for an employee.

From the User's Profile

Navigate to Resourcing > Employees and select the user.
Go to the employee’s Absence tab and check the banner to see the current approval policy status:
- Policy Assigned: Displays the policy name.
- No Policy Assigned: Allows you to select and assign a policy.
Click Edit to open the Edit Approval Policy window.
Select the desired policy. This will automatically apply the approvers and subscribers defined in the policy to the user’s absence allocations.

From Resourcing > Employees

You can quickly assign or update approval policies for multiple employees using inline editing in the Resourcing > Employees screen. Here's how:

Click the Fields menu and select the Approval Policy field.
Use the dropdown to choose a policy from the list and assign it to selected employees.

You can also assign a policy to multiple employees at once.

To do so, tick the box next to the employees' names and select the "Assign Approval Policy" option in the toolbar above.

What If the Employee Doesn’t Have a Manager Assigned?

If the dynamic "Manager" role is used in the policy but the employee doesn’t have a manager set in their profile, you’ll be notified during policy assignment.

You can resolve this by assigning a manager to the employee. Learn more about adding managers to employees here.

Assigning Approvers Without a Policy

To skip assigning a policy and manually set custom approvers for each absence allocation per employee:

Select "No policy" in the Edit Approval Policy window.
Manually assign approvers for each absence category in the employee's profile.

This approach provides flexibility for individual setups while functioning similarly to approval policies.

Good to Know: Default Approval Policy

When setting up your approval policies, you can designate one as the default.

This ensures every new employee is automatically assigned the default policy, saving you time and reducing manual assignments!

Checking Approvers and Subscribers

To view the details of approvers and subscribers for a specific absence allocation:

Hover over the Approvals and Notifications section in the employee’s Absence tab.

Visibility of Approvers in Profiles

Employees with only the "View your own absence allocations" permission enabled can see their own approvers and subscribers but cannot view those of other employees.
System permission sets: Staff, Coordinator.
Employees with the "View all users' absence allocations" permission can see approvers and subscribers for all users in the organization
The “View allocated absence for users in their workplace” permission limits this visibility to users within the same workplace or subsidiary—for example, when the “all users” permission is turned off.
System permission sets: Manager, Profitability Manager, Admin.