Reassign or escalate a task

What this achieves

A request stops moving when the person it is waiting on does not act. Humavera handles most of that on its own through deadlines and escalation, and leaves you a manual hand-off for the cases it cannot.

Required role: Administrator. Reassignment is not available to managers.

Steps

Go to Approvals → Task Inbox.
Open the task that has stalled.
Select Reassign.
Choose the New assignee.
Enter a Reason. It is optional, and worth writing.
Select Reassign.

Reassignment is a hand-off, not a copy

The new assignee is notified and the task becomes theirs. The original assignee loses access to it — they cannot decide it afterwards, and it leaves their inbox.

Example: Olivia Bennett is on unplanned sick leave and a transfer request has been sitting with her for two days. Priya Raman reassigns it to Daniel Okonkwo, who then sees it in his own inbox. Olivia no longer does.

Reassignment is recorded. It is not a way to move a decision quietly.

What happens without you

Three things run on their own, and between them they cover most stalls. All three are configured on the approval step, not on the task.

Option	Description
Deadline	Each approval step can carry a time limit, set in hours, days, or weeks. The inbox counts down against it and flags the task as BREACHED once it passes.
Reminder	A reminder can be sent a set number of hours before the deadline. Leaving it empty or at zero means no reminder is sent.
Escalation	When a deadline is breached, the step escalates to the target it nominates — the approver’s manager, or a specific person you name. A step with no escalation target set stays where it is and stays flagged.

Example: HC Corp gives a manager approval step 48 hours with a reminder 12 hours before, escalating to the approver’s manager. James Whitfield’s request reaches Olivia Bennett on Monday morning. She is reminded on Tuesday evening, and if she still has not acted by Wednesday morning it escalates to her own manager rather than waiting for her return.

Delegation happens before any of this

If the assigned approver has an active delegation, routing sends the task to their delegate when it is created — you do not reassign it and you do not wait for it to breach. There is nothing to configure on the step for this to work.

Set delegation up in advance rather than reaching for reassignment afterwards. See Set up approval delegation.

When no approver can be found at all

An approval step can name a fallback approver, used when the step’s normal approver cannot be resolved — for example a step that routes to an employee’s manager when that employee has no manager recorded.

A step can also be marked as not required, in which case it is skipped when no approver can be found rather than stalling. Treat that as a deliberate choice: a skipped step is an approval that never happened.

What happens next

A reassigned task carries on from the same step under the same route, with the same deadline it already had — reassignment moves who decides, not what is being decided. If the whole request has become obsolete rather than stalled, cancel the instance instead of hunting for someone to decide it.