Who approves leave?

Approval belongs to a permission rather than a title, because one company's reporting line is not another's.

Requesting leave, by contrast, sits in the baseline every account holds. Everybody can ask; the permission decides who answers.

The funnel view exists because the aggregate tells a different story from the queue. A large pending share is not a leave problem. It is an approver problem, and it is invisible when you look one row at a time.

A today panel sits beside it showing who is away now, what is waiting, and what the next seven days hold.

Those two views answer different people. The panel answers a manager planning this week. The funnel answers whoever owns the process, because a rising pending share is a workload problem rather than a leave problem.

A month-over-month view sits alongside both. That is the one that catches a queue getting slowly worse, which nobody notices from a single screen.

Spread the right to approve across two roles rather than one. A queue behind one person stops the week that person takes their own leave, which is exactly when requests pile up.

Asking is different from answering. Requesting leave sits in the baseline every account holds, so nobody has to be granted it. Agreeing to it is a right a role carries.

Three outcomes exist and all three are states, not silences. Waiting. Agreed. Turned down. A request that was refused is a recorded outcome rather than something that simply never came back.

Quick filters separate the waiting ones from the rest. That is the view worth opening first.

A queue with one approver stalls the moment that person takes their own leave. Spreading the permission across two roles costs nothing and removes the single point of failure.

Watch the pending share rather than individual requests. A rising proportion is the earliest sign that requests are waiting on one person's attention.