An employee taking time off begins with a request, which is approved or not. This piece is about leave requests and approvals in Odoo.
The leave request and approval flow
When an employee wants to take time off, the process is: the employee makes a leave request, of a particular leave type, for particular dates; the request is reviewed and approved, or refused, typically by the employee's manager; and if approved, the time off is confirmed. Odoo's Time Off application handles this flow: the requesting, the approving, and the resulting confirmed time off. It turns the taking of time off from an informal arrangement into a managed flow.
Why a managed flow matters
A managed leave request and approval flow matters because handling time off informally has familiar problems. A request made informally can be forgotten or lost. It can be unclear whether time off was actually approved. There can be no clear record of who is off when. And it can be inconsistent, different requests handled differently. A managed flow fixes this: a leave request is a recorded thing, the approval is a clear, recorded step, so it is unambiguous whether time off was approved, and the confirmed time off is on the record. The taking of time off becomes managed and clear rather than informal and uncertain.
Approval as a genuine step
The approval in the leave flow is a genuine step: a request for time off is reviewed, and the decision to approve or refuse it is made deliberately, typically by the employee's manager. This matters because whether an employee takes a particular time off is a genuine decision, the manager has to consider it, the team's situation, the coverage, and approval is where that decision is made and recorded. The approval being a clear, recorded step means both the employee and the business know, unambiguously, whether the time off is approved.
Visibility of who is off
An important thing the managed leave flow gives a business is visibility of who is off when. With leave requests made and approved in Odoo, the business has a clear record of the approved time off, so it can see who is away, when, which matters for managing the work, knowing the team's coverage, planning around absences. Informal leave handling leaves this vague; the managed flow makes who-is-off-when genuinely visible.
Leave and the connected people applications
Leave, the approved time off, also connects to other people processes. Notably, time off affects payroll, since how an employee is paid relates to the time they worked and the leave they took, and the approved leave recorded in Time Off can feed into that. So managing leave requests and approvals properly in Odoo is not only about handling time off itself; it produces the genuine record of leave that other connected people processes draw on. The managed leave flow is part of the connected people picture.
The takeaway
Leave requests and approvals in Odoo handle the taking of time off as a managed flow: an employee makes a leave request, it is reviewed and approved or refused, typically by the manager, and approved time off is confirmed and recorded. This matters because it makes the taking of time off clear and managed rather than informal and uncertain, with the approval a genuine, recorded decision. The managed flow gives the business visibility of who is off when, and the recorded leave feeds connected people processes such as payroll. For how we approach Odoo, see our ERP practice.