Team vacations and availability: request, approve and see who is in

The Calendar section has a tab to manage the team's vacations and absences and to see who is available each day. It only appears if the account administrator has turned on the "Vacations and availability" feature.

The tab is called Team calendar (Owners, people with Technical administration permissions and Supervisors) or My vacation calendar (Members). It is a monthly calendar in which each day shows who is away; company holidays are shaded and anything awaiting approval is drawn with a dashed outline.

What each role sees

Owner and Technical administration permissions: the whole team, with the available hours of each day (each person's capacity minus holidays and approved absences), the filter by person and the inbox of pending requests.
Supervisor: themselves and the people in their care (their direct reports).
Member: only their own absences, requests and day balance.

A sick leave (or any type marked as sensitive data) is shown by name only to the person themselves, the Owner and their direct Supervisor. Everyone else just sees "Away", with no type or notes.

Requesting an absence

Press Request absence (or Record absence, if you can record it for someone else).
Choose the type, the dates and, if needed, a half day: tick "First day: afternoon only" and/or "Last day: until noon only".
Add an optional note and send.

The days are calculated on the server: only the person's working days count (according to their weekly capacity) and holidays are not deducted. You cannot request dates that overlap another absence of yours.

Who approves

A Member asks their Supervisor (or an Owner if they have none).
A Supervisor asks an Owner.
Those of an Owner (or of someone with Technical administration permissions) are approved instantly, and so are those of a type that does not require approval.
Nobody approves their own. A Supervisor can also record absences for their direct reports, which are approved.

Whoever has to decide gets a notification in the bell and sees the request in the Pending requests inbox, where they can Approve or Reject (with an optional reason). If the request exceeds the person's day balance you are warned and approving requires explicit confirmation. The requester gets a notification with the decision. While it is pending you can cancel it; an approved one can only be cancelled by someone who can decide.

Annual day balance

Each type can deduct from an annual balance of days. Owners and people with Technical administration permissions assign each person's days per year (plus those carried over from the previous year) under Annual balances. Your balance, with what is used and pending, appears in your calendar. Requesting more than the balance is allowed, but you are warned.

Holidays and absence types

With Set up vacations, Owners and people with Technical administration permissions maintain the company's holidays calendar (a single one for everyone, with an option to repeat every year) and the absence types: name, colour, whether they deduct balance, whether they require approval and whether they are sensitive data (sick leave).

Effect on the rest of WorkOS

The Team workload panel, the Task board and My hours this week deduct holidays and approved absences from capacity; the day shows as "Holiday", "Away" or "Half day off".
When assigning a task to another person, an Owner or that person's Supervisor cannot pick a day on which they are away all day. A half day does not block.

With Kairos and MCP connections

You can ask Kairos, or Claude/ChatGPT connected to WorkOS, for example "who is on vacation next week?" or "how many days do I have left?". It sees exactly what you see in the tab: nothing more. With Kairos (inside WorkOS) you can also ask it to request an absence for you: it shows you a card to confirm it. From Claude/ChatGPT you can only look things up; to request, use Kairos or the tab. Approving or rejecting other people's requests is only done in Calendar.

For privacy, sick leaves do not go through the chat: Kairos shows them as "Away" and cannot request them; they are requested from the tab.

If you cannot see the tab or cannot request

If it does not appear, the feature is not turned on for your account or Calendar is not available.
If it tells you that your user is not linked to a Team record, ask the account administrator to link it (until then there is no one to attribute your absences to).