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The Privacy settings section under Settings > General allows administrators to control how absence data and department calendars are shared across the organization. These settings ensure that sensitive information is only visible to the right people while allowing flexibility for operational needs.

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Privacy & permissions

Here are the configurable privacy settings and their implications:

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Other departments

Toggle description: When activated, employees can view the calendars of all departments. If disabled, employees will only see the calendar of their own department.
  • Enabled: Users can view all department calendars.
  • Disabled: Users can only see their own department’s calendar.
This restriction does not apply to administrators, who always maintain full access to all calendars.

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Calendar view

Toggle description: Controls access to the full calendar view of a user’s absences.
  • Enabled: Displays a user’s absences for the entire year, similar to the “My calendar” feature in the main menu.
  • Disabled: Only the user, their manager/approver, and the administrator can access the user’s full calendar.

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Show absences in the past

Toggle description: Determines whether past absences are visible to all users.
  • Enabled: Past and future absences are visible to all users with the appropriate calendar access — depending on their user role and the workspace’s privacy settings. Absence details are shown, but the visibility of specific reasons depends on the leave type privacy settings.
  • Disabled:
    • Regular employees can view upcoming team absences if they have the appropriate calendar access — depending on their user role and the workspace’s privacy settings — and have full access to their own past and future absences.
    • Approvers and representatives can see both past and upcoming absences of the employees they are responsible for. Visibility of past absences starts from the date they were assigned the role – absences before that remain hidden.
    • Managers can see all past and upcoming absences, provided they have access to the users in the department. It does not matter when they were assigned the role.
Admins can always see all leave details of all users, past and present, regardless of when their role was assigned and whether or not the toggle is activated.

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Retroactive absence cancellation by department manager

Toggle description: Grants department managers permission to cancel past absence requests.
  • Enabled: Department managers can cancel absence requests that have already started or occurred in the past.
  • Disabled: This functionality remains exclusive to administrators.
Regular employees can only cancel their own future absences, regardless of the toggle setting. All cancellations trigger an email notification or Teams Bot message to relevant parties, ensuring transparency.

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Summary of user roles and permissions

Here’s how the different privacy and visibility settings interact with user roles in absentify:

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Regular user

Default permissions
  • Can always see their own absences, including all details and reasons — this is never restricted by privacy settings.
  • Can view only their own leave allowances, such as vacation days or other allowance quotas.
  • Can cancel their own future absences.
  • Can create leave requests for the current fiscal year and one fiscal year into the future.
  • Receives notifications about their own absence requests based on their personal notification settings.
  • Can see the day and month of colleagues’ birthdays and anniversaries (but not the year or age), as long as those colleagues are visible to them based on the workspace’s privacy settings.
Conditional visibility based on privacy settings
  • Can see absences of other users based on the Other departments toggle:
    • If enabled, they can see absences of all users across the workspace.
    • If disabled, they can only see absences of users in their own department.
  • Can see past absences of other users only if the Show absences in the past setting is enabled. If disabled, only current and future absences are shown.
  • Visibility of absence reasons depends on both the Leave type privacy and Reason visibility settings:
    • If Leave type privacy is enabled, only assigned approvers, assigned representatives, department managers of the requestor, and admins can see the leave type.
    • If Leave type privacy is disabled and Reason visibility is enabled, only assigned approvers, assigned representatives, department managers, and admins can see the reason.
    • If Leave type privacy is disabled and Reason visibility is disabled, all users who can see the absence can also see the reason.

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Representative

General permissions
  • Has all the same rights as a regular user, as outlined above under the default permissions for the regular user.
Additional access for accepted representative assignments
Scope of access: The following rules only apply to requests for which the representative has accepted their representative assignment. If the representative declined the assignment for a request, they will no longer see the absence details for that request, and their rights revert to those of a regular user.

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Approver

General permissions
  • Has all the same rights as a regular user, as outlined above under the default permissions for the regular user.
Additional access for assigned approvals
Scope of access: The following permissions apply only to approvers who are directly assigned to a specific request, and take effect from the moment the assignment is made.
In all other situations, the approver has the same permissions as a regular user.
  • Can process absence requests they are assigned to approve.
  • Can view the leave allowance quotas of users whose requests they are assigned to approve, in addition to their own.
  • Can see all absence details of employees in their department — but only from the time they are assigned as an approver. Before that point, regular user permissions apply.
  • Can track the full approval process of requests they are involved in, including any edits or decisions made by others.
  • Receives notifications for absence requests they are involved in, according to their personal notification settings.

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Department manager

General permissions
  • Has all the same rights as a regular user, as outlined above under the default permissions for the regular user.
Additional access within managed departments
Scope of access: The following permissions apply only to the department(s) the user is explicitly assigned to manage, and take effect from the moment the manager assignment is made. In all other departments where they are simply a member (but not a manager), they retain the same permissions as a regular user.
  • Can view the leave allowances of employees in their department.
  • Department managers only receive notifications for absence requests they are directly involved in, based on their personal notification settings, but can also stay informed about other departmental absences by enabling the weekly absence summary.
  • Can see all absence details of employees in their department regardless of leave type privacy settings or the Show absences in the past setting.
  • Can view the full birth date as well as work anniversaries (including year and age) of employees in their own department via the [Insights page]/en/roles/manager/using_insights).
  • Can cancel absences within their department, including:
Important: Department managers cannot approve leave requests unless they are also assigned as the approver.

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Administrator

General permissions
  • Can create absences for any user in the workspace — for the current fiscal year as well as one year in the past or future.
  • Has full visibility over all absences across the entire workspace.
  • Has full control over user settings, including adding and removing users, and viewing/updating all profile and allowance settings.
  • Can cancel any absence request regardless of its status — up to one fiscal year in the past or future.
  • Can configure all privacy and system settings in the workspace.
  • Can export absence data for any time period since the workspace was created.
Additional permissions for Billing
  • With Billing Admin enabled:
    • Can edit all billing data, change the payment method, view past invoices, and see the current plan.
  • With Billing Admin disabled:
    • Cannot access the Billing or Upgrade tabs in the workspace settings.