Use case · Time off & HR
One front door for everything an employee has to ask for.
Leave, equipment, a desk move, a training budget, a letter for a visa application. These are small requests that get asked constantly, answered inconsistently, and recorded nowhere — until someone disputes what was agreed.
Free plan, no card required. Submitters are always free.
PPL-412
Amara O. · Support
Time off request
- Type
- Annual leave
- Dates
- 17 Aug 2026 → 28 Aug 2026
- Working days
- 10
- Cover arranged with
- Joel M.
- Handover planover 5 days
- Shared doc linked; on-call swapped with Joel
A date-range field, not two text boxes — so the request is data your reports can actually use.
Small requests, asked constantly, tracked nowhere
Nobody builds a process for this because each individual instance is trivial. In aggregate it's several hours a week and a recurring source of genuine disagreement.
“Hey, any chance I could take the 17th off?”
- Asked in a DM, agreed with a thumbs-up, recorded in nobody's calendar.
- The manager is on leave themselves, so it sits unanswered for a week.
- Two people on the same team book the same fortnight; nobody notices until August.
- Six months later there's a genuine disagreement about whether it was ever approved.
A leave request with a record
- A date range, a type, and a cover arrangement captured in one form.
- Delegation routes it to whoever is covering while the manager is away.
- Approved, rejected, or sent back with a comment — always with a timestamp.
- The submitter watches the status themselves instead of asking for updates.
Short and forgiving, because most of these are yeses
Over-engineering a leave process is how you get a leave process nobody uses. One approver, one escalation, one clear answer.
Time off — execution
trigger
Request submitted
Amara O. requests 10 working days in August.
approval:select-users
Line manager
Any one approver. Delegated automatically if they're OOO.
time:delay
SLA — 2 days
A durable timer that survives restarts, not an in-memory reminder.
notification:request-owner
Escalate to admins
Nobody should wait a fortnight to hear about a fortnight off.
action:set-status
Status: Approved
The submitter is notified the moment it lands.
action:webhook
POST hr-system.internal
Optional — push the approved dates into your HR system of record.
In a group chat
6 days
Mostly spent waiting for a manager who was themselves away, with no cover configured.
On Requester
4 hours
Routed to the delegate immediately, approved from a phone notification.
Illustrative. Leave requests are rarely contentious — the delay is almost entirely a routing problem, which is exactly the kind of problem delegation solves outright.
The second request is one click
Request again re-submits a past request pre-filled, and smart pre-fill puts your last answers into a template you’ve used before — badged, with a one-click start-blank. Recurring asks stop being recurring data entry.
Fewer interruptions, and an answer when it’s disputed
Cover that actually works
OOO delegation means the approver being away is no longer the reason a request sits for a week.
Approvals from a phone
PWA install and web push, plus one-click decisions from the email. No laptop required.
Nobody chasing anybody
The submitter sees live status on My Requests; reminders handle the follow-up nobody enjoys.
A team-level view
Saved views by team and date, so overlapping leave is visible before it becomes a staffing problem.
What this process leans on
Date range fields
A real typed range rather than free text, so duration and overlap are computable.
Learn moreOOO delegation
The single highest-value feature for leave approvals — assignments route to a delegate automatically.
Learn morePush & mobile
Install to a home screen, get web push, decide from the notification.
Learn moreRequest again
Re-submit a previous request pre-filled, for the asks that repeat every quarter.
Learn moreOn time off and HR requests
- Does Requester track leave balances?
- No — it handles the request and the approval, not the accrual ledger. Keep balances in your HR system and use the event webhook to push approved leave into it. Requester's job is that the request was made, seen, decided, and recorded.
- What happens when the manager approving leave is themselves on leave?
- Out-of-office delegation. The manager sets a delegate and new assignments route to them automatically, recorded as a delegation rather than a silent reassignment. This is the single most valuable feature for leave approvals, for obvious reasons.
- Can people request from their phone?
- Yes. Requester installs as a PWA with web push, so requesting leave and approving it both work from a home screen. Approvers can also decide straight from the email without opening anything.
- Do we have to pay for every employee who requests leave?
- No, and this is the case where it matters most. Submitters are unlimited and free on every plan — you only pay for owners, admins, and members flagged as reviewers. A 200-person company might have 15 billable seats.
- Can one form cover different kinds of leave?
- Yes. Use a dropdown for leave type and conditional logic to ask the follow-ups that only apply to some of them — a return-to-work note for sick leave, a handover plan for anything over two weeks.
Other processes teams start with
Purchase approvals
Spend requests routed by amount, approved with the numbers attached.
IT access requests
Tool and permission requests with an auditable grant history.
Vendor onboarding
Collect vendor detail, route legal and finance sign-off, keep the file.
Expense approvals
Receipts, amounts, and cost centers captured before anyone decides.
Client & external intake
A public link that turns outside requests into tracked work.
Your whole company can submit. You pay for the handful who approve.
Time off is the process that proves the pricing model: unlimited free submitters, and seats only for the managers actually making decisions.