Departments and teams

Departments are the main grouping in Rotaleave — they drive cover limits, report filters and approval routing. Teams are a finer grouping inside (or independent of) a department. Both are admin-only, under Settings → Departments and Settings → Teams.

Departments

Add a department by typing its name and clicking Add department. Select one to manage its settings:

• Max people off at once — the department’s cover limit (0 = no limit, up to 20). When an approval would take the department over this cap, the approver sees a “Department over capacity” warning on the request and must consciously override it.
• Default working-hours template — applied automatically to new members. Moving an existing person into the department never changes their hours silently: you get an “Apply department hours?” prompt with Keep current hours / Apply choices. There’s also an Apply to all members button that shows exactly whose hours would change before you confirm.
• Managers — add or remove the people who manage this department. Department managers are part of the default approval cascade.
• Teams in this department — attach teams to the department.
• Approval policy — an optional department-specific policy that overrides the org default; see Approval rules and policies.

You can’t delete a department that still has teams, members or rules attached — reassign those first.

Teams

Teams hold members and optional team managers:

• Add a team with Add team, then select it to manage Members.
• Each member row has a manager checkbox — tick it to make them a team manager.
• If a team has no manager, its leave requests fall back to the department manager.
• Teams can carry their own Approval policy too.

A person’s Home team is set from their allowance panel on the People page (admins: People → Allowance → Home team), or left as “None (department-governed)”.

How requests route

With no approval policy anywhere, a leave request cascades: the person’s team managers first, then department managers, then any manager. Policies at team, department or org level replace that cascade for their scope — most specific wins.