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 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.

Deactivating vs deleting

Two options when someone leaves:

• Deactivate — from the team list, open a member’s actions menu and choose Deactivate. The member keeps their leave history, is hidden from the wallchart and approval conflicts, loses access to the organization (any sign-in attempt is blocked at the org level), and stops counting toward your billed seat count. This is what you usually want. Only admins can deactivate, and you can’t deactivate yourself.
• Delete — permanently removes the member and all their requests. Irreversible. Only use for accidentally created accounts.

For clean historical reporting (end-of-year exports, audit trails), deactivate. Deleting orphans the history. You can Reactivate a member at any time from the same actions menu — their history and settings come back exactly as they were, and they start counting toward seats again.

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 deactivate the departing admin. 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 deactivate every admin. If you somehow do, contact support — there’s no self-service recovery.