Absences
The Absences module lets team members mark themselves as away (vacation, busy period, whatever) and have that reflected everywhere else in the panel automatically.
Requesting an absence
Any team member can submit an absence request with a start and end date. What happens next depends on your team's settings:
If confirmation is required, someone with
confirm_absencesneeds to approve it before it counts.bypass_self_confirmlets specific people (usually team leads) confirm their own absence requests instead of waiting on someone else.
manage_absences covers the settings themselves - whether confirmation is required at all, and general oversight of the absence list.
What it affects
Once an absence is active:
The person shows up as away in Team List.
If Meetings is enabled, they're automatically excluded from attendance expectations for meetings that fall inside the absence period - no need to manually decline each one.
This is the main reason to enable Absences even for smaller teams: it saves the awkward "sorry I forgot to say I'm on vacation" moment before every meeting.