Leave request form example: how do I organise leave requests that arrive on WhatsApp?

At half past eight on Monday morning, the HR specialist has three separate conversations on their phone. A shift supervisor has written on WhatsApp that an employee “can’t come tomorrow”. A manager has said “approved” for Thursday by email, but did not copy HR. Accounting is asking about an employee’s remaining leave days. All three are the same topic, and all three are in different places. The specialist opens a spreadsheet: it shows the employee’s balance as 9 days, but two days approved through another channel a week ago have not been entered yet. This article walks through a fictional four-week example of turning this mess into a single flow, a leave request form example you can use, and the reason behind each step.

Employee self-service leave is a method in which employees create their own leave requests and can follow the approval process and their remaining balance themselves. The aim is to move HR from being the person who retypes requests one by one to being the person who manages rules and exceptions.

Scenario: a fictional manufacturing company, a four-week transition

The company below is fictional: a fifty-person manufacturer working in shifts, with one HR specialist and five managers. The figures are only there to make the example concrete.

Week 1: Where do the requests come from?

The first job is to count the channels. For two weeks, the HR specialist marks every incoming leave request by the route it came through and arrives at this table:

The table shows one thing: the problem is not that any channel is bad, but that none of them keeps the balance and the approval in the same place. Banning WhatsApp is not the solution; if you keep having the same information written somewhere else too, your work doubles. While counting channels, look for answers to three questions for each request: who did the request reach, where is the approval written, and who deducted the balance? If three different people answer in three places, the request flow has no owner; the first job of the transition is to give this flow a single owner.

Week 2: Write the rules and the leave request form

In the second week, the rules of the new flow are written on a single page and discussed with the managers. What matters is that the rules are short and the same for everyone. The rule list should also answer the questions employees ask most: what to do when ill, how to report a shift change, and how to cancel leave that has already been approved. If these three have no written answer, the old channels reopen by themselves.

1. A single channel is set for leave requests; requests from other channels are not considered valid.
2. The request includes the leave type, the dates and the return-to-work date; the fields are fixed as in the leave request form example below.
3. The request goes first to the manager, then to HR; both decisions are entered in the record.
4. In emergencies (such as illness), the employee calls their manager and the request is entered on the first working day.
5. The number of working days within which an approval or rejection is given is set.
6. The remaining balance is visible to everyone on the request screen or in the report.

Week 3: A pilot with one department

The office team is chosen first instead of the production line. Employees create requests from their phone’s browser, and the manager and HR approve them. The HR specialist measures two things: where employees get stuck and which rule is missing. In the first days, two records show a wrong balance; the cause is earlier leave that had not been entered in the opening balance. During the pilot, a manager objects that “WhatsApp was faster”; the HR specialist shows that the approval screen opens on the phone and the approval now stays in the record. A pilot exists precisely to catch errors and objections like these before going live.

Week 4: Close the old channels

The last week is set aside for announcing the rules to the whole company and closing the old channels. The announcement is kept short:

From today, leave requests are accepted only through the leave system. Requests sent via WhatsApp or email will not be processed; in an emergency, call your manager and create the request in the system on your first working day.

For the first two weeks, requests arriving on WhatsApp are politely redirected to the system. After the third week, redirection decreases, because employees can now see their balances and approval status themselves. At the end of the fourth week, three things are checked: has the number of requests via WhatsApp and email gone down, has the average waiting time of pending requests become shorter, and have calls to HR asking about balances become less frequent?

What is a leave balance?

A leave balance is the number of days left after the leave days used are deducted from the leave days the employee is entitled to. For example, if the annual entitlement is 20 days and 8 days have been used, the balance is 12 days. If a request is awaiting approval, those days do not yet count as used but may affect a new request; so it is good practice to see the balance at the time of the request and at the time of approval separately. A reliable balance depends on every period of leave being deducted from a single record.

How do you track employee leave requests that arrive by email?

Until you move to the new flow, it is possible to at least make requests arriving by email searchable. For a temporary setup, these steps are enough:

• Open a shared inbox for requests; have requests sent to managers’ personal addresses forwarded there.
• Fix the subject line: Leave request – name – date range.
• Copy HR on every manager’s approval email.
• Keep a single reply thread for each request and state the approval explicitly.
• Produce a weekly summary and update the spreadsheet from it.
• Write the email date of every request entered in the spreadsheet on its row.

This setup works but is not permanent: the balance is still updated by hand and the approval trail is still scattered across inboxes. A shared inbox does not answer whether the manager’s reply reached HR; it only makes searching easier. As the number of requests grows, producing a weekly summary also turns into a half-day job.

How does employee self-service leave work in a leave management system?

In YazSis KurumsalPortal, the Mobile Leave Management module lets employees log in to the portal from their phone’s browser and create a leave request; they do not need to install a separate app. The request is checked against the remaining leave balance and then goes to the manager. In the basic flow, HR approval is completed after the manager’s approval and the leave is entered in the calendar; every approval step stays on record. Because the balance is tracked from these approved records, employees, managers and HR work with the same up-to-date information.

The portal runs on the customer’s own server, and standard cPanel hosting is enough. Importing existing WhatsApp conversations is not among the module’s described features; what matters in the transition is the opening balance derived from approved leave. We recommend clarifying how this balance will be loaded in the pre-installation meeting.

If you want to try the four-week transition in your own team, you can review the Mobile Leave Management module.