Managing employee leave in most ERP systems feels like it was designed by someone who has never actually had to approve a vacation request under time pressure. You open a list, click into a record, read the details, click approve, go back to the list, click the next one, read, approve, back to the list. Repeat forty times during budget season when everyone suddenly remembers they have unused PTO.
Odoo has quietly rebuilt its Time Off module around a fundamentally different interaction model. The default view is now a Kanban board — not a list — and the change ripples through every part of how managers and HR teams handle leave requests, from initial submission to final approval.
Kanban as the Default Changes the Daily Workflow
When a manager opens the Time Off module now, they see cards instead of rows. Each leave request appears as a Kanban card showing the employee’s name, the type of leave, the dates requested, and — critically — action buttons right on the card itself. Approve and Refuse buttons sit at the bottom of each card, eliminating the need to open individual records for routine decisions.
The cards are grouped by status by default: pending requests that need attention, approved requests that are confirmed, and refused requests for reference. Managers can also group by department, which is useful for team leads who only need to see their own team’s requests rather than the entire organization’s leave calendar.
Once a request has been approved, validated, or refused, its card disappears from the default view. This is a small design decision with a significant practical impact: the board always shows what needs attention right now. There’s no scrolling past dozens of already- processed requests to find the one that still needs a decision.
Allocations Get the Same Treatment
The Kanban overhaul extends beyond time-off requests to allocation management. When HR teams need to grant additional leave days — a common scenario during year-end rollovers or when company policies change — they now work with the same card-based interface.
Allocation request cards show the employee, the leave type, the number of days being allocated, and the current status. The same inline approve and refuse buttons appear, and the same disappearing-when- processed behavior keeps the board clean.
For organizations that manage allocations in bulk — distributing annual PTO balances to departments, granting compensatory time after busy periods — the Kanban view makes it possible to process a queue of requests with nothing but clicks. No record opening, no page navigation, no waiting for forms to load. The card is the interface.
The Request Form Gets a Structural Rethink
On the employee side of the equation, the time-off request form has been restructured to reduce confusion around date handling. The previous version used a “Dates” field that handled both single-day and multi-day requests, with conditional fields for half-day and hourly options that appeared and disappeared based on configuration settings. It worked, but the mental model wasn’t obvious.
The redesigned form uses a singular “Date” field with clearer conditional behavior. When an employee selects half-day leave, the form adapts to show the relevant half-day options. When hourly leave is enabled for the selected leave type, hour selection fields appear inline rather than in a separate section. The field previously labeled “Custom Hours” is now simply “Hours” — a name that actually describes what you’re entering.
The form also introduces a more prominent document attachment area. For leave types that require supporting documentation — medical certificates for sick leave, jury duty summons, bereavement notifications — the attachment point is now visually obvious rather than tucked behind a generic attachments icon.
Navigation Gets Department and Status Filters
The Kanban board ships with built-in grouping options that previous list views handled through column sorting. Department grouping uses a folder icon that feels natural for hierarchical browsing, while status grouping uses a people icon that maps to the approval workflow. These aren’t just cosmetic changes — they reflect a shift toward contextual navigation where the view adapts to how different roles interact with leave data.
A team lead cares about their department’s requests. An HR officer cares about everything pending approval. A payroll specialist cares about what’s been validated and affects upcoming pay runs. The grouping options let each role see the same data from their own angle, without building custom saved filters or reports.
What This Means in Practice
The Time Off module changes are the kind of improvements that don’t make headlines but change daily habits. A manager who processes ten leave requests a week saves maybe two minutes per request by not having to open and close individual records. Over a year, across an organization of any real size, those minutes compound into hours of recovered time.
More importantly, the Kanban default changes the psychology of leave management. A list view with 47 items feels like a chore. A Kanban board with four cards in the pending column feels like something you can knock out between meetings. The information density is the same; the perceived workload is different.
For organizations considering Odoo for HR management, or those already using it and wondering whether to upgrade, the Time Off overhaul is a quiet signal that the platform is investing in the mundane parts of HR — the daily workflows that determine whether software feels like a tool or an obstacle. The new Kanban board is just a view change. But it’s the view change that makes you stop dreading the leave-approval tab.