The Cancel Approved Leave feature allows permitted users to cancel a leave request that has already been approved. This is useful when an approved leave needs to be reversed due to a mistake, schedule change, employee request, or business requirement.
When an approved leave is cancelled, the system updates the leave status to Cancelled and reverses the related leave balance adjustments according to company rules.
Who Can Use This Feature #
The Subscriber Admin can cancel any approved leave request in the company, as long as it meets the same payroll and timing rules that apply to everyone.
Employees can cancel an approved leave only if your company’s leave approval flows make them eligible. Cancelling isn’t a permission you switch on like most other actions in Office-X — it comes from how the approval flow steps are set up.
Permission Behavior
You won’t find a “Cancel Leave” permission under Dashboard → Admin → Permission — there isn’t one, and you don’t need the Approve or Reject permission either. Cancel eligibility comes only from Dashboard → Admin → Approval Flows, where each step of a leave flow can be marked as allowed to cancel an approved leave. Whoever that setup makes eligible will see the Cancel Leave option; everyone else simply won’t.
Cancellation Eligibility Behavior #
Cancel eligibility comes from the leave approval flows set up under Dashboard → Admin → Approval Flows (see the Approval Flows guide). Any step in a leave flow can be marked as allowed to cancel an approved leave. An employee is eligible to cancel an approved leave if:
- They’re named as a Selected Employee on a step that’s marked to allow cancellation, or
- A step marked to allow cancellation is set to Reporting Manager, and they are, in fact, that specific requester’s reporting manager.
If a user doesn’t meet either condition, the Cancel Leave option simply won’t be available to them for that request.
Good to know: eligibility is checked across all of your company’s leave approval flows — not only the flow this particular leave request travelled through. So if you’re named on a cancel-allowed step in any leave flow, you can also cancel an approved leave that came through a different flow. It’s worth keeping that in mind whenever you mark a step as cancel-allowed.
Good to know: there’s no separate rule stopping you from cancelling your own approved leave. If the approval flow setup makes you eligible, that eligibility covers your own leave too. For a typical employee this rarely comes up, since ordinary staff aren’t usually set as cancel-allowed approvers.
Where to Find the Cancel Leave Option #
You can cancel an approved leave from:
- Dashboard → Leave → Approve Route
- Open the action menu for an approved leave request. If the leave is eligible and you’re an eligible canceller, the Cancel Leave option will appear.
- The Cancel Leave option appears only for leave requests with Approved status. Pending, rejected, or already cancelled leaves cannot be cancelled.
Good to know: The Cancel Leave option is only available from the Approve Leaves table. It is not available on the leave request details page or from the Create Leave Request list. If you have permission to cancel a leave, you must use the Approve Leaves table.
How to Cancel an Approved Leave #
- Go to Dashboard → Leave → Approve Route.
- Find the approved leave request you want to cancel.
- Click the action menu.
- Select Cancel Leave.
- A confirmation window titled “Cancel Approved Leave” appears, asking: “Are you sure you want to cancel this approved leave? This will reverse the leave balance adjustments.” There’s no reason or comment field to fill in here — just the confirmation itself.
- Click Yes, Cancel Leave to confirm.
To close the window without cancelling, click No, Keep Leave or the close icon.
Good to know: Seeing the Cancel Leave option does not always mean the leave can be cancelled. When you click Yes, Cancel Leave, Office-X checks the latest payroll and timing rules again. If something has changed, such as payroll being run for that period, the cancellation will not go through and the leave will remain Approved.
What Happens After Cancellation? #
After a leave is cancelled successfully:
- The leave status changes from Approved to Cancelled.
- The employee’s leave balance is restored based on the cancelled leave’s hours — the same “Used” figure that was added when the leave was approved is subtracted back out (never dropping below zero).
- Unpaid leave hours are reversed if applicable, up to whatever the employee’s unpaid-leave total currently is.
- Backdated leave hours are reversed if applicable — the system re-works out how many of this leave’s hours fell into an already-processed payroll period and reduces the backdated total by that amount.
- Lieu leave hours are restored if the cancelled leave used Lieu Leave — the exact number of hours that leave had used is credited back.
- The cancellation date is recorded and shown on the leave’s detail page once it’s Cancelled — both as a Cancelled Date in the overview and as a Cancelled row on the request’s Timeline, alongside who did it.
- The cancelled leave remains visible as history — it isn’t deleted, and the fact that it was cancelled (and by whom) is recorded in the company’s Activity Log.
Good to know: When an approved leave is cancelled, Office-X recalculates the employee’s leave balance based on their current leave records. In most cases, this restores the exact amount used by the cancelled leave.
However, if other leave requests were approved or cancelled in between, the restored balance may be slightly different. If the balance looks incorrect after a cancellation, check the employee’s recent leave history.
Payroll and Timing Restrictions #
An approved leave can’t be cancelled forever — these restrictions exist to keep payroll and leave records consistent once money or finalized calculations are involved.
Which set of rules applies to you depends on whether your company runs payroll in Office-X. “Payroll enabled” here means a Bangladesh company on a plan that includes payroll; every other company follows the second set. If you’re not sure which one you are, check with your Subscriber Admin — the two behave quite differently, so it’s worth knowing before you promise someone a cancellation.
For companies with payroll enabled:
- If this leave’s hours have already been factored into a completed payroll run, cancellation is blocked with: “This leave cannot be cancelled because payroll has already been processed for this period.”
- Separately, if the employee’s most recent payroll run’s pay period already extends up to or beyond this leave’s end date, cancellation is blocked with the same message — even if this particular leave wasn’t itself individually flagged as processed.
For companies without payroll enabled:
- Cancellation is blocked once the leave’s end date has already passed, with: “This leave cannot be cancelled because the leave period has already ended.”
In either case, once cancellation is blocked, the leave status stays Approved and no balance changes are applied.
Notifications and Emails #
When an approved leave is cancelled:
- The employee whose leave it is receives an in-app notification, and an email if they have an email address on file.
- Everyone who actually approved a step on this specific request also receives an in-app notification, and an email if they have an email address on file. Whoever performed the cancellation doesn’t get a notification about their own action.
- The notification and email include the leave type, the leave period, the status (“Cancelled”), and who performed the cancellation.
Good to know: If a leave request was created on behalf of an employee, the person who submitted it will not receive a separate cancellation notification. Only the employee the leave belongs to and the request’s approvers will be notified.
Summary #
The Cancel Approved Leave feature helps organizations safely reverse approved leave when needed. Eligibility comes from the leave’s own approval flow setup — a Subscriber Admin can always cancel, while an employee needs to be a cancel-eligible approver (or the requester’s actual reporting manager on a cancel-eligible step) for that specific request.
Cancelling restores leave balances, keeps cancellation history, notifies the employee and approvers, and is blocked once payroll has processed the period (or, without payroll, once the leave period has already ended) — keeping leave records accurate, traceable, and compliant with company policy.
