1. Where your approvals are
Anything waiting on you reaches you in three ways, and they are all the same list seen from different angles.
- The Approval Directory — the full page, showing everything pending on you, grouped by what kind of request it is. This is the one to work from.
- The notification bell in the header — you are notified the moment a request reaches your level, with the requester, the dates and the reason in the message itself.
- Your home page — the Pending tile counts what is waiting, and clicking it takes you to the directory.
You are only ever shown requests that are at your level right now. A leave application sitting with the Head of HR does not appear on the supervisor's list, even though the supervisor already signed it.
2. Reading the directory
The Approval Directory presents pending work as cards, grouped into sections such as Pending Leave or Pending Purchase Orders. Each card is one request.
A card carries the requester's photo, name, designation, department and contact details — the same information as the employee directory — together with the request itself: the leave type and dates, the amount, the reason, and which stage it has reached. That is deliberate: you can judge most requests from the card without opening anything.
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Scan the group headings first
Each heading tells you how many of that kind are waiting. If one group is long and the others are empty, you know where your afternoon is going.
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Switch to list view for volume
There is a card/list toggle at the top right. Cards are better for judging people; the list is better when you have thirty of the same thing to work through.
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Use the filters down the side
Narrow by department or request type when you only want to deal with one team or one kind of request in this sitting.
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Act from the card, or open the record
The buttons are on the card, so straightforward requests never need to be opened. Open the record when you want the full history — who else has signed, and what they wrote.
An empty directory shows a tick and nothing else. That is the intended state.
3. The three buttons
Three actions, and their colours mean the same thing everywhere in the system — on the card, on the record and on your home page.
You are satisfied. The request moves to the next level, or completes if you were the last one. Your name and the time are recorded against it permanently.
Send it back to the requester to fix something. A note is required — the system will not let you return a request without saying why. The requester can edit and resubmit.
Kill the request. A note is required. The record becomes permanently read-only and cannot be resubmitted; the requester must start a new one.
Return, not Cancel, for anything fixable. Wrong dates, a missing reason, the wrong leave type — those are Return. Cancel is for a request that should not exist at all. Cancelling a fixable request forces the person to retype everything and loses the thread of what was wrong.
Why you cannot simply edit it yourself
A submitted request is locked. An approver cannot quietly change the dates and then approve them, because an approval that can be applied to something the requester never wrote would mean nothing. Return it with a note instead — it takes ten seconds longer and leaves an honest record.
4. How the ladder works
Approval levels are configured by your administrator as data, not written into the program. What follows is how the mechanism behaves, whatever your company has set up.
- Levels run in order. Level two cannot act before level one has finished. Nobody can jump the queue, including senior people.
- Levels that do not apply are skipped, and the skip is written to the history — so a request that went straight from the supervisor to HR shows why.
- Nobody approves their own request. If you would be an approver on something you raised, that level is skipped.
- A level can have several approvers. Depending on how it is set up, the first to respond may decide, or every named approver may have to sign, or they may act in a set order. If a colleague's name disappears from your list before you got to it, they dealt with it.
- Everyone is kept informed. Each level is notified when the request reaches it, and the requester is told each time it moves on and who holds it now.
Changing who approves what is an admin task, not a programming one. Adding a level, naming a stand-in for holidays, or changing which manager signs is edited in the approval matrix by your administrator, and takes effect on the next request. Nothing is rebuilt and nobody is logged out.
5. Approving well
Write notes the requester can act on
"Not approved" tells the person nothing and guarantees a second conversation. "Team is short on the 12th — reapply for the 15th onward" is one line, and it resolves the request in a single round.
Clear the list on a schedule
Approvals are the step where paperwork sits still. Deal with the directory at a fixed point — start of the day, or after lunch — rather than reacting to each notification. It is faster for you and predictable for everybody waiting.
Before you approve leave, look at the card
The dates, the substitute, and how many other people from the same department are already away are on the card. Approving three overlapping absences in one team is much easier to prevent here than to unwind afterwards.
Remember what your signature means
Your approval is attributed permanently: your name, the time, and any note. That is not surveillance — it is what makes the approval worth having, and what protects you when someone asks six months later why a request went through.
6. What else arrives here
Leave is the most common, but the same directory and the same three buttons handle every kind of approval your company has switched on. Depending on your role you may see requests for late arrivals, expense claims, purchase orders, material requisitions, payment vouchers and meal orders.
They all behave identically: grouped by type, actionable from the card, ordered levels, a required note on Return and Cancel, and a permanent record of who decided what. Learn it once on leave and you know it for all of them.
If something you expect is not there, it is at another level, already dealt with by a colleague at your level, or your role has not been granted that approval. The record's own history tab shows exactly where it is.