How to create your company’s Cancelling leave policy

Leave Dates lets you control who can cancel leave requests, when they can cancel them, and how much notice is required. These rules can be managed as a company policy and, where needed, adjusted for individual leave types.

Feature availability: With our Plus plan, you have full policy editing rights, enabling you to create your own personalised cancelling leave policy with different rules for each leave type; on the Essential plan, you are able to edit the default policy, which will then be applied to all leave types; on the Starter plan, you cannot edit any of the policy settings (these are configured to the Leave Dates system default) but you can still view all the policies to understand what rules are being applied.

Open the cancelling leave policy

To view or change the cancellation policy:

Go to Settings.
Select Policies.
Select Cancelling leave from the list of policies.

Understanding the default cancellation settings

Leave Dates automatically provides system default cancellation rules that are applied to your company account at set-up. If you’re happy with these, there’s no need to change anything!

The default rules currently applied to your company are shown in the blue box at the top of the Cancelling leave policy window.

The Leave Dates system defaults are:

Who is cancelling?	Past leave	Future leave	Notice required for future leave
Employee	Not allowed	Allowed	At least 1 day's notice
Approver (on behalf of a direct report)	Allowed	Allowed	At least 0 days' notice

Admins aren’t included in the policy settings as they already automatically have permission to cancel leave requests at any time.

How the default permission levels work

The default cancellation policy is designed with a clear escalation path. Employees have the most restrictive permissions, approvers have more flexibility, and admins are not restricted by the policy.

Our aim is to allow this process to be self-service wherever possible, with issues being handled at the lowest appropriate level, reducing the need for HR or administrators to handle routine requests. So if an employee cannot cancel their leave because of the policy, they can escalate the request to their approver. If the approver is also unable to make the required change, only then do they escalate it to an admin, who can cancel the leave without restriction.

When an approver is cancelling leave for one of their direct reports, the approver-level rules apply. However, when an approver cancels their own leave, they are treated as an employee and the employee-level rules apply.

We recommend giving employees the most restrictive permissions, with progressively greater permissions for approvers and admins. If you configure employees with higher permissions than approvers, you’ll get a warning message because the Leave Dates system will know this is likely to cause issues. There are no restrictions for admins so they will always have the highest permissions.

What does the notice period mean?

The notice period for future leave determines how far in advance a cancellation must be made.

For example, if the policy dictates that an employee must cancel future leave with at least 1 day’s notice, they will only be able to do this more than 1 day before the booked leave is scheduled to commence.

If the policy states that there is a 0-day notice requirement for future leave, the leave can be cancelled right up to the last minute before the leave begins - but once the leave starts, the system considers it ‘taken’ rather than ‘booked’. At this point, it can only be cancelled by those with permission to cancel past leave.

Customise cancellation rules

If the Leave Dates system defaults do not suit your organisation, you can change them in the Details tab.

The policy allows you to configure permissions for:

Employees - for cancelling their own leave
Approvers - when cancelling leave for their direct reports

For each role, you can specify whether cancellations are permitted:

in the past
in the future

You can also specify the minimum number of days' notice required to cancel future leave.

How to apply the same cancellation rules to all leave types

The top blue box section of the Details tab contains the default cancellation rules. These are automatically applied to all leave types which have the Use default option selected.

So if you want to change the policy but have the same rules for all leave types, edit the default settings in the blue box. You’ll notice that as you make these changes, they are automatically applied to all leave types provided that the Use default box is ticked for each one (it’s a good idea to quickly check this!).

Once you’ve made your changes in the blue box, click Save changes. Your new Cancelling leave policy settings will take immediate effect for all users.

How to set different cancellation rules for individual leave types

If you need to have different rules for certain leave types, you can choose to override the default settings at the leave type level. To do this:

Find the relevant leave type in the Cancelling leave policy list.
Untick Use default.
Set the cancellation permissions for employees and/or approvers.
Choose whether cancellation is allowed in the past, in the future, or both.
Set the required number of days' notice for cancelling future leave.
Select Save changes.
Your new Cancelling leave policy settings will take immediate effect for all users.

Leave Dates automatically switches a leave type back to Use default when its configuration matches the company default. This can happen when you manually change the settings for a leave type, but the settings you’ve chosen actually match the default. Or if you change the default settings and they now match changes you previously made to individual leave types. This prevents unnecessary duplicate configurations and keeps genuine exceptions clear.

Review policy updates

The Updates tab provides a full audit trail of changes made to the cancelling leave policy. Every change is recorded as an event in the timeline, with no exceptions. Events are never deleted or modified, so you can always see the history of how the policy has changed.

The most recent changes appear at the top. For each event, you can see when the change was made, who made it, and which policy settings were changed. By comparing the Before and After columns, you can see exactly how the rules were updated.

If the user who made a change is later deleted from Leave Dates, their name may appear as “(Deleted)”, but the event itself remains in the audit trail.

Test your cancellation policy

Before saving your changes, use the Test tab to check how the cancellation rules will apply in different scenarios. This lets you confirm that the policy works as intended before it affects anyone.

Testing your policy this way is also much quicker than manually creating and cancelling leave requests through the Wallchart.

The test tool allows you to select a date for a future leave request and see whether cancellation is permitted for employees and approvers under the current policy settings. This is particularly useful after changing the policy because it allows you to check the effect of your new settings before relying on them in practice.

To run the test:

Open Settings > Policies > Cancelling leave.
Select the Test tab.
Select the date you want to test.
Review the results for each leave type.
Check the cancellation permissions shown for employees and approvers.

The test results indicate whether cancellation is Allowed or Not allowed based on the current policy. In the example above, we’ve selected a date 7 days in the future - and the results show that for this company’s settings, all types of leave request can be cancelled by employees for that date (or any after it) apart from any annual leave bookings which need at least 10 days’ notice.

Reset the policy to the system default

If you no longer want to use your customised cancelling leave settings, you can return the policy to its system default.

The policy interface includes Reset to system default at the bottom of the policy window.