Decide a termination request

What this achieves

When a manager asks to end someone’s employment, the request waits here for an administrator. Approving it authorises the termination; carrying it out is a second, deliberate action.

Required role: Administrator.

Steps

Go to Approvals → Termination Requests.
Find the request showing as Pending approval.
Read the employee, the requesting manager, the reason, the proposed last working day, and the justification.
Select Approve to authorise it, or Reject.
When you are ready to carry out an approved termination, select Execute termination.
Check the pre-filled Termination type, Termination date, Reason, and Notes, then confirm.

Approving is not executing

Approving changes nothing about the employee. It records that the termination is authorised and moves the request to awaiting execution, where it waits for you to carry it out.

That separation is deliberate. Authorising and executing are different decisions, often made on different days, and the record shows both.

Example: Olivia Bennett requests the termination of a report on 3 August 2026 with a proposed last working day of 31 August. Sophie Clarke approves it that week, and executes it at the end of the month. The employee’s record does not change in between.

Executing cannot be undone

Executing runs the termination immediately: the employee’s status changes, offboarding starts, and their access is revoked. There is no undo.

Read the pre-filled fields before confirming. They come from the request, and the request was written by someone who was not necessarily thinking about the leaving date the payroll cycle needs.

Rejecting

Rejecting asks for a reason, and the reason goes back to the requesting manager.

The employee is not affected by a rejection and is never notified that a request existed. This holds while the request is pending too — nothing about it is visible to the person it concerns.

When a workflow handles it instead

If your organization has bound an approval workflow to termination requests, the decision is made on the workflow task rather than here, and the row shows that it is awaiting workflow approval.

Execution still happens here, after the workflow approves it.

What the statuses mean

Option	Description
Pending approval	Submitted by a manager, waiting for an administrator.
Approved — awaiting execution	Authorised. Nothing has changed for the employee yet.
Executed	Carried out. Offboarding has started.
Rejected	Declined, with a reason returned to the manager.

What happens next

An executed termination hands over to the offboarding process — checklist, access revocation, and final settlement in payroll where one applies. The request itself stays on this list as the record of who asked, who authorised, and who carried it out.