Managing members

Members are the people in your organization. Each one has a profile that controls their allowance, working schedule, approver, and role. Manage them under Settings → Team.

Inviting a new member

1. Go to Settings → Team.
2. Click Add member.
3. Fill in:
   • Name and email (required).
   • Role — admin, manager, or employee. See roles & permissions.
   • Department — required. Pick from your department list. Onboarding creates a default department so you always have one to choose.
   • Job title, employee ID, start date — optional, for record-keeping.
   • Allowance (required) and allowance unit — annual entitlement in days or hours.
   • Work schedule — leave blank to inherit the org default, or customise for part-time staff.
   • Public holidays off — whether public holidays count as non-working for this member.
4. Click Send invite.

By default new members route approvals through their department manager (or whoever currently manages the department they land in). To give a member a specific approver instead, edit them after invite — see editing a member.

The member receives an email with a secure link valid for 7 days. They click through, set a password, and land in the app ready to use.

If the invite expires before they accept, remove them and re-invite — there’s no resend button yet.

Editing a member

Click any member in the list to open their profile. You can edit everything except the email address (ask us via support if an email needs to change). Common edits:

• Allowance — bumping up/down when entitlements change, e.g., a promotion or a company-wide increase.
• Role — promoting someone to manager, or handing admin to a new lead.
• Approver — the member who reviews this person’s requests. Defaults to “Use department manager” (the manager on their current department). Only override it when the department manager shouldn’t be the approver — e.g., the member reports into a different team, or the department has no manager set and you want to name one explicitly for this person. Only admins can change the approver. If the person you pick is currently an employee, Deckchair auto-promotes them to manager so they can actually approve — and if they later lose every duty, auto-demotes them back. See auto-promotion and auto-demotion.
• Work schedule — when someone moves to part-time or changes their pattern.
• Leave year start — override the org default (useful for companies that prorate on anniversary dates).

Changes to allowance apply from the start of the current leave year. Used/pending days are not reset — only the entitled figure changes. If you want to reset used days (rare), contact support.

Start date and first-year pro-rating

When you add a member with a start date that falls inside their current leave year, Deckchair automatically pro-rates their first-year entitled value. A 25-day allowance with a 1 July start date on a calendar leave year comes out to 12.5 days — the calendar-day fraction of the year they’ll actually be employed, rounded to the nearest half day. The next leave year is always the full 25.

If you correct an existing member’s start date later, the current-year entitled is recomputed to match the new date. This is the right way to fix an imported record that had the wrong hire date. If you change both allowance and start date at the same time, both are reflected. Changing allowance alone also re-pro-rates the current year, because the pro-rated figure is a function of the allowance.

Leave the start date blank if you don’t want pro-rating — the member then gets the full allowance for every year.

Ending a member’s employment

When someone is leaving the company, open their row in Settings → Team, click the actions menu (⋯), and choose End employment. You’ll be asked for:

• End date (required) — the last day of employment, inclusive. If their last day is 30 June, enter 30 June. Access is revoked and billing stops from 1 July onward.
• Termination reason (optional) — free text, for your HR records only. Not shown to the member.

After you confirm, a Final Balance figure is shown in the dialog. This is the number of unused entitled days at the end date, calculated as:

pro-rated entitlement up to end date + carried-over days − days already used

The hour equivalent is shown alongside the day count. Use this figure for any payout calculation. The final balance is only computed at the time you mark (or update) a leaver — there’s no separate lookup after dismissing the dialog.

Note

End date semantics: the end date is inclusive — the member’s last working day. The day after the end date is when access is revoked and the seat drops from your bill.

What changes once employment is ended

• Notice-period leavers (end date in the future): they stay on the team list and wallchart with a Leaving [date] badge. They can still book leave up to their end date.
• Past leavers (end date already passed): they’re hidden from the active team list. Select the Former filter chip on Settings → Team to see them, where they show a Left [date] badge.
• Leave requests after the end date stay in the database but don’t count toward the balance and don’t appear on the wallchart after the end date. A request straddling the end date contributes only its pre-end-date working days.
• Sign-in is blocked from the day after the end date.
• Seat count drops from the day after the end date — this is reflected immediately on the Settings → Billing page.

Only admins can end a member’s employment. You can’t end your own employment.

Viewing former members

The team list at Settings → Team has three filter chips:

Filter	Shows
Active (default)	Current members, plus notice-period leavers with a Leaving [date] badge
Former	Members whose end date has passed, each with a Left [date] badge
All	Everyone — active, notice-period, and past leavers combined

Reinstating a member

If a former member returns — for example, a short-term contractor coming back, or a departure that didn’t go ahead — open their row in Settings → Team (use the Former filter to find them), open the actions menu, and choose Reinstate. This clears the end date and restores full access.

Their leave history, allowances, and settings come back exactly as they were, and they start counting toward your seat count again.

Note

Re-hiring after a gap: reversing leaver status reuses the same member record, including the original start date. If the gap is long enough that you want to reset the accrual basis — for example, someone who left two years ago and has now been re-hired as a new employee — update the Start date on their profile after reversing. This re-pro-rates their current-year entitlement from the new hire date.

Deleting a member

Delete permanently removes the member and all their requests. Irreversible. Only use for accidentally created accounts.

For clean historical reporting and audit trails, end their employment instead. Deleting orphans the history.

Bulk actions

Need to onboard dozens of people at once? Use Settings → Team → Import for CSV bulk import — see bulk importing members.

Transferring ownership

If the only admin leaves the company, promote someone else to admin first, then end the departing admin’s employment. There’s no special “transfer ownership” flow — the admin role is not limited in number, so any admin can do anything including adding/removing other admins.

Be careful: don’t end every admin’s employment before the end date. If you somehow end up with no active admins, contact support — there’s no self-service recovery.