Managing Leave Requests

Approve, edit and delete leave requests.

Jye avatar
Written by Jye
Updated over a week ago

This guide details how to manage leave requests.

  • Staff apply for leave through the Tanda Mobile App or online at my.tanda.co

  • Leave is approved by managers online at my.tanda.co. Managers see leave requests for the teams that they manage. To learn more about who can approve leave, see Assign permissions to staff

How the leave approval process works

When an employee submits a leave request, it will be in a pending status until a manager approves or declines the request. When a manager approves a leave request, timesheets for the leave dates are automatically created containing the leave hours.

How to approve leave requests

To approve leave requests, access Tanda in a web browser at my.tanda.co.

Navigate to Time & Attendance > Leave to see your list of pending leave requests.

Next, approve or decline the leave request using one the below options:

  1. Approve: approved leave requests are added to timesheets. The employee will be notified that their request has been approved.

  2. Decline: managers are prompted to give a reason for declining. The reason entered will be visible to employees.

Tip: To decline a leave request that has already been approved, select view and then decline.

How to block out periods of leave

Custom events show employees what important events are on when applying for leave, and can be used to show unsuitable times to take leave and restrict leave requests for a period altogether.

  • To create a custom event, navigate to Time & Attendance > Rosters > Events & Comments > + Add New Event.

  • To display a 'Leave discouraged' warning, select 'Discourage staff from taking leave'. This warning appears on both the Roster and on the leave application form for employees when any of these dates are selected.

    Note: the 'Discourage staff from taking leave' option shown above won't prevent leave requests from being submitted during this period, but employees will be warned that it's unlikely to be approved. All leave requests ultimately require approval:

  • To restrict leave requests for a specific event or period of events, select "Prevent staff from taking leave". A 'Maximum number of requests' can be entered to assist in managing staffing levels for the event:

  • In the instance that the leave quota has been met, a disclaimer on the employee's mobile app explains why leave cannot be requested for the date:

  • Note: the 'Prevent staff from taking leave' option shown above will prevent leave requests from being submitted during the period and employees will be unable to submit leave requests. Managers and Admins are able to submit leave on behalf of the employee and override the setting.

See who submitted, approved or declined a leave request

An audit trail of all leave changes, and the times that each change was made can be found by navigating to the respective leave request and clicking Tools > View History.

Notifications when employees submit new leave requests

Once a day Tanda sends an email to admins and/or managers, notifying them of new leave and unavailability requests.

To control who receives these daily email alerts in your Tanda organization, navigate to Settings > All Settings > View all leave settings > Send daily update emails to and select whether you want the notification emails to go to:

  • Team managers

  • Admins

  • Team managers and Admins

  • None

To view or change your personal notification preferences:

  1. Log in to my.tanda.co

  2. Navigate to your user profile icon in the top right-hand corner

  3. Select My Notification Preferences

  4. Toggle on/off Time off request daily update emails


Note: to reduce spam, Managers who have not logged into Tanda for 1 month will not receive this notification.

Leave requests explained

  1. Leave Type: shows available types based on your leave settings

  2. Team (optional): allocates leave cost to a team

  3. All-day: turn off to edit leave request times for part-day requests

  4. Dates

  5. Breakdown: shows the hours and days leave will apply. The breakdown is determined by your leave auto-fill settings, and can also be manually edited

  6. Total hours: the sum of the leave breakdown

  7. Reason (optional): for employees to provide more detail on the reason for requesting time off

  8. Attachment (optional): useful for attaching documents like medical certificates

Troubleshooting and FAQ's

An employee doesn't see the option to apply for leave

Each leave type will only be visible to employees that are defined in the 'applies to' settings for the leave type. To edit who each leave type applies to, navigate to Compliance > Leave Types then click the relevant leave type to edit. Check the Applies to section to see if the leave type is set to an employment type or tag that is associated to this employee.

How to edit a leave request after it has been exported to payroll software (how to edit a locked leave request):

Once a timesheet containing leave has been exported, the leave request can only be modified once the timesheet is unlocked. The Admin permission level is required to unlock timesheets. To unlock a timesheet, navigate to the respective timesheet and click unlock timesheet in the top right.

Why can't an employee submit an unavailability request?

An unavailability request is unable to be submitted for a particular date if:

  • The request falls within the 'Minimum number of days notice required for unavailability' set in your organization settings, or;

  • There is already a roster published for the period that the employee is requesting to be unavailable


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