Purpose: This article explains how Staff Absences work in Administrate and how absences affect scheduling, availability, calendar visibility, and conflict warnings.
Staff Absences help you record when instructors, staff, or company-wide resources are unavailable for training delivery.
Table of contents
Note: The Staff Absences feature replaces the legacy Instructor Holiday and Staff Holiday features.
Overview
Staff Absences allows you to manage instructor leave, staff leave, company-wide holidays, and other absence types in a single place.
Recording absences helps prevent scheduling conflicts and improves operational visibility across your training delivery.
Absences appear in the calendar and generate conflict warnings when attempting to assign affected instructors or staff to Events.
Staff Absences work alongside Personnel Roles, scheduling, and availability management to help prevent assigning unavailable personnel to Events.
Absences can also be created programmatically using the API or integrated HR systems.
Permissions
Ensure the correct permissions are configured for User Roles:
- Holidays – Edit: View and edit all absences
- Holidays – View: View all absences, with no edit access
- Own Holidays – Edit: Create and manage only your own absences
Permissions can be combined depending on role requirements.
Instructor and staff absences
To record absences for a Contact, the Instructor or Staff flag must be enabled on their Contact record.
In this context, staff means Contacts who may be involved in training delivery, scheduling, administration, or other operational responsibilities.
Absence reasons, such as vacation, sickness, or training, are configured in Calendar Management.
Once an absence is created:
- It appears in the calendar view.
- It generates conflict warnings during scheduling.
This helps prevent assigning unavailable instructors or staff to Events.
Company-wide absences
Company-wide absences are not assigned to a specific Contact.
Instead, they apply across all relevant calendars and generate conflicts when scheduling Events or assigning instructors during those dates.
Use company-wide absences for holidays, closures, or other dates when training delivery should generally be treated as unavailable.
Calendar integration
Consider enabling Outlook calendar integration to improve visibility of availability, particularly when working with external instructors whose calendars are managed outside Administrate.
This helps identify potential conflicts that may not be captured within the system alone.