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Question

Best Practices for Structuring Approval Workflows for Time-Off Requests Across Multiple Teams?

  • March 17, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 33 views

Hi Personio Community!

 

We're a growing company (~250 employees) and we're currently restructuring how we handle time-off approval workflows. As we've scaled, our current setup has become a bit messy, and I'd love to hear how others have approached this.

Our challenge:

Some employees report to a team lead AND a project manager, and we're unsure who should be the approver.
We want managers to see their team's absence calendar before approving, to avoid too many overlapping absences.

For longer absences (5+ days), we'd like to add a second-level approval (e.g., department head).

My questions:

 

How have you set up multi-level approval flows in Personio? Any tips or pitfalls?

 

Do you use any custom rules to differentiate approval steps based on the length of absence?

How do you handle approval for employees with dual reporting lines?

 

Are there any integrations or workarounds you've found helpful alongside Personio's built-in features?

Would love to hear what's worked (or hasn't worked) for your organization. 

 

Thanks in advance!

1 reply

  • Getting Started
  • March 20, 2026

Hello,
We are also a mixed-structure organization, and similar approval route requirements often come from our projects.

Our approach has been to assign the actual approval directly to the line manager, while sending a notification to the matrix manager. Since we consider that decisions regarding an employee primarily belong to the line manager, it is usually sufficient for the matrix manager to be informed.

Since the matrix manager receives a notification when a time-off request is created—or, in your case, when the request exceeds 5 days—they can communicate with the line manager and intervene if any potential conflict or important situation arises.