Last updated on January 27, 2026
What Is the Schedule and Flow of Leave Reminders?
If you're seeing reminders land in Slack, Teams, or your inbox at predictable intervals, that's not random — Vacation Tracker runs every pending request through the same cadence. Three reminders, then expiry. The whole flow caps at seven business days for standard requests, and the schedule resets if the requester edits their leave.
The Schedule at a Glance
Reminders are counted in business days — weekends and configured holidays don't tick the clock forward. Each reminder rides on whatever channel the original leave request came through (Slack, Microsoft Teams, or email).
A Worked Example
Say a User submits a request on Wednesday, August 2nd for a leave on August 14th, and the Approver is working a standard Mon–Fri week:
What Resets the Schedule
The User edits the request
If a User edits their leave request at any point before it's been responded to or expired, the reminder flow starts over from the beginning. The 1st reminder fires the next business day after the edit, the 2nd after 3 more business days, and so on.
What doesn't reset it
An Approver simply opening a notification, clicking through to the dashboard without acting, or reading an email isn't a "response" — it doesn't count. Only an explicit Approve or Deny action stops the reminder schedule for that request.
Special Cases
Auto-approved leave requests
If the leave policy auto-approves the request (no approval routing required), no reminders are sent at all. The request goes straight from submission to approved without entering the reminder schedule.
Multiple Approvers with different working weeks
Each Approver's reminders follow their own working days. If two Approvers work different schedules — say one is Mon–Fri, another is Tue–Sat — the request expires 2 business days after the first Approver receives their third reminder. The "first Approver" here is whichever one's working day comes up first after the request is submitted.
Past-dated leave requests
If a User submits a request for dates that have already passed (where the leave policy allows it — see How Can Users Request a Past Leave?), the reminder flow follows the same cadence but the request expires 2 business days after the final reminder — a total of 10 business days from submission rather than 7.
The leave ends before the request would expire
If the leave's end date arrives before the 7-business-day expiration timer runs out, the request expires at the end of the last day of leave — not on the original 7-day deadline. Example: a request submitted on May 7th for a leave on May 10th expires (if not responded to) at the end of the day on May 10th, since the leave is fully behind us by then.
What Triggers a Reminder (and What Doesn't)
The system only sends reminders for requests that are open and pending. As soon as one of these things happens, reminders for that request stop:
Common Questions
Three is the cap because reminder fatigue sets in fast. The first nudge catches the genuinely-forgot-about-it cases, the second flags the request as urgent, and the third is a last call before the system expires the request and the User has to start over. Going beyond three would just add noise without changing outcomes.
The schedule counts business days, which factors in weekends and the holidays configured for the user's Location. A statutory holiday on a Monday won't tick the reminder clock forward — the timer picks up on the next working day.
The reminder cadence is the same across the platform — it isn't a per-Department setting. What you can control is whether requests expire at all (the Leave Request Expiration toggle on each Department). Setting that to Yes keeps requests open until the leave end date, which essentially turns off the auto-expiry behavior. See How to Enable or Disable Leave Request Expiration?
Book a Call