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Absences & approvals

An absence in Agenda is more than a yellow dot on the calendar. It’s a complete workflow: request → optional cover pick → push to approver → decision → automatic booking into the balance and pay.

Submitting a request

The employee opens Absence request in the drawer (mobile) or in the web dashboard and provides three things:

  1. Period — date range, with a live preview of working days (weekends and holidays are automatically subtracted).
  2. Reason — from the list your company maintains (see below).
  3. Optional: half day — morning or afternoon.

Before submission you see immediately: “3 working days (weekends & holidays excluded)”. No nasty surprises, no after-the-fact math.

Pick a cover — the key difference

In classical systems every request goes to “the boss”, and the boss doesn’t know who stands in for the employee. Agenda flips this around:

The employee picks a colleague themselves who approves the request and steps in on the shift.

Three benefits:

  • The colleague is involved immediately — they see the request in their inbox before they have to “take over”.
  • No one is surprised — the whole shift knows who’s filling in as soon as it’s approved.
  • The boss is relieved — routine cover arrangements are handled inside the team.

If no cover is picked, the request falls back to admins — the old behaviour stays available for edge cases.

Approving — on mobile or web

Classical time-tracking expects the foreman to sit at a PC. Agenda lets approvals happen straight from mobile via the drawer entry “Approvals”.

The inbox has two tabs:

  • My inbox — requests the employee explicitly addressed to me.
  • All requests — visible to admins, showing the entire branch.

Each card shows: requester, date range, reason, half-day flag, comment, cover badge (“Cover: Müller, Anna”). Two buttons: Approve or Reject — both trigger a push notification to the requester.

Manage reasons — you stay in control

In the admin panel you maintain a central list of absence reasons (Vacation, Sick, Home-office, Vocational school, Business trip, Special leave, Training, Time off in lieu, Parental leave, …) with:

  • Name — the wording employees see
  • Code — 2 letters for calendar cells (UB, KR, HO, …)
  • Paid / unpaid — decides whether the hours count toward working time

Changes are live in all apps immediately — no version update required.

Half days

Half working days are standard in Germany (doctor’s appointment, half vacation day). Agenda knows:

  • Morning (firstHalf)
  • Afternoon (secondHalf)

The request then uses only 0.5 day from the vacation balance. In the year view, the cell appears with a clear contrast indicator.

My requests

In “My requests” you see your complete request history:

  • Status filter — All, Pending, Approved
  • Type filter — Absence, Work-hours correction, New booking, Flex payout
  • Stats banner — “12 requests, 3 pending” in the user’s language, plural-aware
  • Withdraw — as long as it’s pending, with one tap

Holidays are computed correctly

A national holiday in the middle of a 5-day vacation costs 4 days, not 5. Agenda deducts holidays and weekends automatically. For regional specifics (Corpus Christi in Bavaria, Reformation Day in the east) you configure them per branch and all calculations follow automatically — see Calendars & holidays.

What you save

  • No parallel workflow via email and the system.
  • No spreadsheet “who’s actually in today?”
  • No argument “you said you’d cover for me” — it’s all on record.
  • No call from accounting at month-end.

Next steps