By team
People processes shouldn't live in your inbox
Leave, onboarding, role changes, policy acknowledgements. Each one is a form, a manager, sometimes a second sign-off, and a person waiting to hear back. stepbase runs them as tracked requests so the employee can see where their own request is without asking you.
HR is the routing layer, and it shouldn't be
Someone emails a leave request. You check the entitlement, forward it to their manager, wait, chase, forward the long ones to a director, then reply to say it's approved. Meanwhile the same person has emailed twice asking. None of that is HR work. It's addressing envelopes, and it happens on top of a spreadsheet that only you can see, holding information that shouldn't be in a spreadsheet at all.
Today
- Leave requests arrive by email, chat, or a form nobody watches
- HR forwards each one to the right manager by hand
- Long absences need a director, and remembering that is a person's job
- Entitlement and cover notes sit in a spreadsheet only HR can open
- "Has my leave been approved?" comes back to HR every time
- Entitlement history is whatever the last person to edit the spreadsheet typed
On stepbase
- One request form, the same fields every time, dates and cover included
- Each request routes to the manager on record without HR touching it
- A condition on the length sends long absences to a director automatically
- Sensitive fields are hidden from reviewers who don't need to see them
- The employee follows their own request through to the decision
- Every approval, rejection and comment is timestamped against a named person
How it works
- 1
Ask for the same things every time
Build the request form once: leave type, first and last day, working days, who is covering. Required fields and date rules are enforced before submission, so you stop sending requests back for missing information.
- 2
Route up the manager chain
Send the review to a specific person, a team queue, or look the approver up from a workspace table at the moment the task is created. That table is how a request finds the requester's own manager rather than a hardcoded name.
- 3
Escalate only what needs it
A condition reads the request itself. Five working days or more picks up a director sign-off; anything shorter is confirmed on the first decision alone. The threshold is a rule, not something a person has to remember.
- 4
Keep the sensitive parts sensitive
You choose which fields a given reviewer sees. A manager can approve the dates without reading the medical detail underneath.
- 5
Close the loop without an email
The person who started the request can see everything that has happened on it, and can't change any of it. Rejections carry the reviewer's comment, so the answer arrives with its reason attached.
Start from a template
Every template is fully editable: change the stages, forms, and routing to match how you work.
FAQ