Review and approve a case

What this achieves

Approving a case resolves it to a stage on the escalation ladder, attaches that stage’s consequences, and generates the letter served on the employee. It is the decision point of the whole process, and what it produces goes to a person.

Required role: Administrator. A manager can raise a case and cancel one that is still awaiting review, but only an administrator approves.

Before you start

Read the description, the evidence, and the witness statements before you look at the stage. The stage is computed from history; whether the account supports a case at all is a judgement, and taking it in the other order lets the number make the decision for you.

Approval is not a formality. What follows it reaches the employee’s pay, their reward eligibility, or their record.

Steps

Go to Disciplinary → Disciplinary Cases.
Filter the Status to Pending review, or find the case in the list.
Open the case.
Read the Overview — the description, the evidence, and the witnesses.
Read the Escalation context to see which stage the case resolves at.
If you are moving the case off that stage, enter an Override stage and a Justification (required for override).
Select Approve.

Reading the escalation context

The escalation context tells you which incident of this violation the case is, and which rung of the ladder that produces. It reads as the incident number, the stage number, and how many stages the ladder has, followed by the stage’s name.

Two notes appear when they apply.

Option	Description
Clean period elapsed — history reset	Earlier incidents fell outside the violation type’s reset window and no longer count. The case starts from the first stage again.
Capped at the final stage	The incident count is past the end of the ladder, so the case resolves at the last stage rather than one that does not exist.

Example: a third lateness incident for Tom Hargreaves inside a twelve-month reset window resolves at the third rung of that ladder. A third incident where the second was fourteen months ago shows the reset note and resolves at the first rung instead.

If the number surprises you, the reason is in the violation type’s reset window and the incidents behind it, not in this case.

Overriding the stage

Where the disciplinary policy for the entity allows it, the panel says so and you can move the case to a different stage. A Justification (required for override) must be given, and both the original computed stage and your justification are recorded on the case permanently.

Write the justification for someone reading it in a year with none of today’s context. “Proportionate given the circumstances” explains nothing; what the circumstances were does.

Where the policy does not allow overrides, the stage is whatever the ladder produced and there is no control to change it. That is the setting working, not a fault.

Approving through a workflow instead

Where the disciplinary policy requires approval, the case routes through the approval workflow, and the assigned approver acts on it from their own task list rather than from the case. The separation of duties, deadlines, and escalation configured on that workflow apply here as they do anywhere else.

Cancelling instead

Cancel case is available while a case is in draft or awaiting review, and not afterwards. Cancel where the case should not have been raised, or where the account is wrong — a case cannot be edited, so cancelling and raising a corrected one is the only route.

Once a case has been approved and served, cancelling is no longer offered.

What happens next

Approving resolves the stage, attaches its consequences, and generates the served letter from the stage’s letter template. Where the violation type or the policy requires acknowledgement, the action then goes to the employee and waits for their response before any consequence applies. Where acknowledgement is not required, consequences follow directly.

The case is now part of that employee’s history for this violation, and it counts towards the stage of the next case of the same type until its reset window elapses.