Balances, requests, approvals, and how leave changes capacity.
Time off in Synthelio is not just an HR record. It reduces available capacity, which changes utilization and feeds forward planning, so leave that never gets recorded produces a resource plan that promises people who are not there.
Balances are tracked per type of leave and per year, showing the total you are entitled to, how much you have used, and how much remains.
Types are configured for your firm, which matters more than it sounds for teams working across countries. Statutory leave in Poland and paid time off in the United States are different entitlements with different rules, and they are not interchangeable rows in one bucket.
A request carries a type and a date range. Once submitted it sits pending until a manager acts on it.
While it is pending you can change the dates or cancel it yourself. Once it is approved you cannot, and changing approved leave goes back through your manager. That is the right split: an approved absence is already visible to other people and may already have moved someone's allocation.
Managers see requests waiting on them and can approve or decline. Declining takes a note, and it is worth writing a real one. A decline with no reason attached reads as arbitrary, and the reason is usually concrete and defensible, such as a client demo in the same week or two people already out.
Before approving, the useful question is not whether the person has the balance. It is what is committed in that window. Someone at full allocation on a fixed-price engagement in its final two weeks is a different decision from the same person in a quiet month, and the allocation view answers that.
Pending requests and declines are private. They are never posted to a shared Slack channel, and only approved leave appears publicly.
This is deliberate. Whether you asked for time off and were told no is between you and your manager. Whether you are out next Thursday is something your team needs to know.
Approved leave is visible on a calendar, which answers who is out next week without anyone having to ask, and is the fastest way to check before promising a client a date.
Approved time off reduces the capacity a person is measured against, which is correct. A person on vacation for a week should not read as underutilized for that week.
The practical implication for planning is that utilization figures across a holiday-heavy month are not comparable to a normal month, and neither is the amount of work your firm can absorb. August and late December look like capacity on a plan built from headcount and are not.
Public holidays are configured per person, since they depend on where somebody actually works rather than where your company is registered.
Worth auditing once. A team member on the wrong country's holiday calendar produces quietly wrong capacity numbers all year, and it is the kind of misconfiguration that surfaces only when someone is marked available on a day they were never going to work.
Can I cancel approved leave? Not directly. Cancellation before approval is self-service; after approval it goes through your manager.
Do I log time off as hours on a timesheet? No. Time off is requested and approved through its own flow, not logged as work.
Can I check my balance without opening the app? Yes, if you have an AI assistant connected through the MCP connector. Balances, team balances, and who is out next week are all readable, and a request can be submitted the same way.
Who can approve? Managers, admins, and controlling roles, depending on how your firm is set up.
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