Roles and permissions
What an employee, a department manager and an administrator can do, and how roles are assigned.
LeavePilot has two real roles, Employee and Administrator, plus an extra responsibility an employee can be given: being the manager of a department.
Side by side
| Action | Employee | Department manager | Administrator |
|---|---|---|---|
| Request leave for themselves | yes | yes | yes |
| See their own requests and their own balances | yes | yes | yes |
| Delete their own requests | yes | yes | yes |
| See colleagues' approved vacation in the calendar | according to the visibility the organisation has chosen | the same as an employee, plus every request in their own department in any status | always, for everyone |
| Approve or reject requests | no | only those of the people in their own department, and only if the approval mode is Admin and department manager | all of them, their own included |
| Receive the new request email | no | yes, in the mode above | yes |
| Manage employees, departments, countries, public holidays | no | no | yes |
| See reports, documents and recent activity | no | no | yes |
| Change the settings | no | no | yes |
| Edit their own profile | yes | yes | yes |
The employee
This is the role given to whoever registers on their own and, as a rule, to whoever is invited. They see their own area with dashboard, calendar, requests and profile. They cannot approve anything, not even their own requests.
The department manager
This is not a role you pick in the profile: a person becomes a manager when an administrator sets them as the Manager of a department, from the Departments section. They can manage more than one department.
What changes for them:
- the badge Manager · {department names} appears in the side menu, along with the Team Requests item and the number of pending requests;
- they see the requests of the people in their departments in any status, not only the approved ones;
- if the organisation uses the Admin and department manager mode, they receive the email for every new request in their department and can approve or reject it from the Team Requests section;
- their own requests are created waiting for the administrator, unless the organisation has chosen automatic approval for managers. They can never approve their own.
A manager who is deactivated stops counting as a manager, and their team's requests are left for the administrator to approve. Everything else is in Approving your team's requests.
The administrator
Whoever creates the organisation is the first administrator. Other administrators are added by inviting a person with Role: Administrator, or by changing the role of an existing employee from the Employees section.
The administrator sees and does everything: manages the people, approves the requests, reads the reports, configures the settings. They also have a personal area of their own, My Requests, for their own leave. Who approves an administrator's requests depends on the Admin holiday requests setting: see Request approval.
Some protections apply to every administrator:
- you cannot delete your own account, nor the last administrator left;
- you cannot remove the administrator role from yourself, nor deactivate your own account;
- if an administrator is the only active one, their leave requests are approved automatically, otherwise nobody could approve them.
How a role is changed
Only an administrator can change a person's role, from the edit window in the Employees section. The change is immediate and applies from that person's next login.