Depending on how you have set up Leave Management when your employees request time off, they have to be approved by their time off approver.

Who an employee's time off approver is depends on what you select in your time off approver settings.

Where are time off approver settings?

As an admin user, click your name in the top right, then click Settings.
On the settings menu click Time off, then click Time off approvers.

📎NOTE: The rest of these steps are for Sage HR users who have the Leave Management module. If you use Sage HR Essentials, as some options differ, we recommend using our other HR Essentials guide to manage your time off approvers.

Who can be a time off approver?

In your time off approver settings is list of all your employees and four columns that state who approves their time off.

Admins

By default, everyone has Admins set to Yes. This means all administrator-level users will receive time off request notifications for the selected employee(s).

📎NOTE: Administrators, even if they aren't approvers, are still able to edit requests.

Direct manager

By default, Direct managers is set to No. Direct managers are based on the company org chart.

If you set this to Yes, this means whoever is their direct manager can approve their time off. When their direct manager changes, the new direct manager becomes their time off approver.

Team managers

📎NOTE: Team managers aren't available as an option for Sage HR Essentials.

By default Team managers are set to No.

Team managers are based on your team settings. An employee can only be in one team but there can be multiple managers per team.

If you set this to Yes, this means whoever is their team manager can approve their time off. There can be multiple team managers for the employee's team.

If their team manager changes, the new team manager then becomes their time off approver.

📎NOTE: Team Managers, even if they aren't approvers, are still able to edit requests

Individual approvers

📎NOTE: Individual approvers aren't available as an option for Sage HR Essentials.

By default Individual approvers are blank.

An individual approver is a specific employee you assign to receive time off requests from another employee. You can add multiple employees and they can be anyone from within the company. They will always be the employee's time off approver no matter what role they have in the Sage HR company.

Each time off approver receives an email of each request and the ability to accept and decline requests.

📎NOTE: These employees can approve time off requests. Making them a time off approver doesn't give them access to any other personal information of the employee.

📎NOTE: It's possible to assign 'Approve or decline time off requests' as a permission to a role.

Find out more

We recommend you only assign this permission to a role in scenarios where you think it will be useful. This is because if you start using this permission, it can be difficult to see why a user is receiving time off request notifications.

We also recommend you don't assign this permission to any of the default roles. Instead, create a new role, and then assign the 'Approve or decline time off requests' permission to it. It is then your choice whether you want the user to be able to approve time off for:

Just themselves
Employees who report to them
Specific employees
Teams they're team manager for
Teams they're in
Specific teams
Employees assigned to the same location as them
Specific locations
All users

Edit an employee's time off approver

Set up who you want to approve time off for specific employees.

Edit a time off policy's time off approver

As well as a time off approver for an employee, you can also set an approver for a specific time off policy. This means they'll only get approval requests made for that policy.

Reminders of time off requests

You can set up email reminders to approvers who have time off requests that still need to be responded to.