There are times when an employee’s sole approver suddenly becomes unavailable, takes an unexpected leave, or forgets to delegate their pending approvals. In these urgent situations, time-sensitive attendance requests—like overtime, leave, or official business applications—can quickly pile up.
As an Admin user in Sprout HR, can you step in to approve these attendance applications directly?
The short answer is not automatically—but there are flexible workarounds you can use to process these requests without delay. Here is a guide on how Sprout HR handles administrative approvals, how approval flows work, and what steps you can take to keep things moving smoothly.
Understanding Approval Rules in Sprout HR
To maintain strict compliance and organizational oversight, Sprout HR enforces specific rules around who can authorize employee requests:
- Strict Level-Based Approvals: Only users who are explicitly assigned to an employee’s approval flow or level have the permission to approve attendance applications.
- Standard Admin Capabilities: By default, Admin permissions allow you to view, edit, and cancel employee attendance applications across the company, but they do not grant automatic override powers to approve them unless you are explicitly listed as an approver.
- Immediate Supervisors First: By default, the first approval level in any flow is automatically set to the employee’s immediate supervisor.
How Admins Can Handle Pending Approvals
If you need to step in and handle pending applications while a primary approver is out of the office, you can adjust the system configuration using these options:
Step 1: Add the Admin user to the Approval Flow
You can temporarily add an Admin user to the approval levels as a last-level approver, and grant them formal system authorization to approve pending employee requests. When combined with a Parallel Approval Flow (see Step 2), approving a request at a higher level bypasses lower-level steps. For example, in a 3-level sequence where the Admin is placed at Level 3 (last level), their approval immediately grants full, final approval for the leave request without waiting for Levels 1 or 2.
See How to Customize the Next Level Approver in Sprout HR
Step 2: Switch to a Parallel Approval Flow
If your company frequently experiences bottlenecked approvals, consider changing the approval flow type from Sequential to Parallel:
Difference between Sequential and Parallel
- Sequential Flow: Requests move step-by-step from Level 1 to Level 2. Level 2 cannot approve until Level 1 completes their review.
- Parallel Flow: All assigned approvers (including backup Admin users) receive the request at the same time. However, if the last level approves first, the application gets approved automatically without having to wait for Levels 1 and 2 to approve.
See this article about Sequential vs. Parallel Approval Level Flow
Important Reminder: Changing the approval flow type will be applied to all employees within the company.
Once you update an employee's approval levels or flow structure, employees must re-submit their pending attendance applications for the updated approval flow to apply.
While Sprout HR Admins cannot override approvals out of the box, updating the approval levels provides an easy, compliant way to handle absent approvers. By temporarily adding an Admin to the flow and switching to a Parallel approval flows, you can ensure that your team's attendance applications are processed quickly and accurately without causing payroll delays.
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