Edit or cancel a leave request

What this achieves

A leave request can be changed or withdrawn while it is still waiting for a decision. Cancelling returns the days to your balance, so a request you no longer need does not keep holding time you could book elsewhere.

Required role: Any signed-in user. You can act on your own requests.

Steps

Go to Leave → My Requests.
Find the request, which must still be Pending.
Select Edit to change it, or Cancel to withdraw it.
If editing, adjust the dates, reason, or attachments, then select Save changes.

Only while pending

Edit and Cancel appear on a request only while its status is Pending. Once a request has been approved, rejected, or cancelled, neither action is available.

Example: if Olivia Bennett has already approved James Whitfield’s leave, he cannot edit it himself. Changing approved leave is a conversation with whoever approved it, not a self-service action.

The leave type cannot be changed

When editing, the leave type is fixed. You can change dates, the reason, and attachments, but not what kind of leave it is — to do that, cancel the request and submit a new one.

Example: a request submitted as annual leave that should have been sick leave is cancelled and re-submitted, not edited across.

What cancelling does to your balance

Submitting a request moves those days into a pending state and reduces your available balance immediately. Cancelling returns them.

That is why cancelling matters rather than leaving an unwanted request to be rejected: until it is decided or withdrawn, it is still holding days you cannot otherwise book.

Example: if James Whitfield books a week and his plans change, cancelling puts those days straight back on his available balance so he can request different dates.

Editing resets the decision

An edited request is still a request awaiting a decision. Changing the dates does not carry over any prior view of it, and the approver sees the request as it now stands.

What happens next

An edited request continues to whoever approves your leave, and its timeline records what happened. A cancelled request stays visible in your list with a Cancelled status rather than disappearing, so the record of what you asked for and withdrew remains.