Approving requests

If you’re assigned as an approver on at least one member’s profile, or you have the admin or manager role, you’ll see the Team requests page in the nav. This is where you handle everything approval-related.

The team requests page

Requests are grouped into two tabs:

• Pending (the default) — the queue you need to act on. The tab label shows a count badge when there’s work waiting.
• All Requests — every request from every member you can see, regardless of status. Use this to look up historical approvals, rejections, or cancellations. Paginated at 15 per page.

Each row shows the member, leave type, date range, total days, and a status chip (Pending, Approved, Rejected, or Cancelled). Click a row to open the review dialog — you can review from either tab.

Reviewing a request

Click any pending request to open the review page. You’ll see:

• Full name, role, and department of the requester.
• The leave type with its policy (deducts from allowance? requires approval?).
• The exact date range with half-day indicators.
• The requester’s reason if they provided one.
• A context panel showing the requester’s current balance and whether approving would push them into negative.
• A conflicts panel showing anyone in their department already off on overlapping dates.

Approve

Click Approve. Optionally add a comment — the requester sees it in their email notification. The days immediately move from Pending to Used on the member’s balance.

Reject

Click Reject. A comment here is strongly recommended so the requester understands why. Rejected requests can be resubmitted with different dates.

Who approves whom

Each member has an approver field on their profile, set under Settings → Team → Edit member. That approver is the default reviewer for that member’s requests.

• If you’re a manager, you can approve requests for any member whose approver is set to you — plus anyone in a department you manage.
• If you’re an admin, you can approve anyone in the organization, regardless of their assigned approver.

Set one approver per member. If you need redundancy (e.g., a second manager who can cover approvals when the primary is out), make them an admin, or assign different members to different approvers so there’s no single point of failure.

Booking on behalf of a member

Sometimes you need to book leave directly for a team member — for example, when someone calls in sick and doesn’t have access to submit themselves.

1. Open Request leave.
2. Choose the team member from Booking for.
3. Fill in the form as normal.

When an approver submits on behalf of someone, the request is auto-approved (no pending state) regardless of the leave type’s approval requirement.

Bulk actions

Deckchair doesn’t currently support bulk-approving multiple requests in one click. Each request is reviewed individually so you don’t accidentally approve something that conflicts with coverage.

Keeping on top of the queue

• Enable the New request email notification under Preferences so you get pinged when a request lands.
• Review the wallchart when deciding — a request that looks fine in isolation might leave your team under-covered.
• Use Max absent on departments (see departments) to enforce coverage rules so over-booking is rejected at submission time, not at your desk.
• Use locked dates to flag company-wide closures that shouldn’t count against balances — they surface the dates on the wallchart and warn members on submission.