Holiday Request App in Power Apps - Automated Approvals and Calendar Integration for a UK Tech Firm

Background The Client Challenge

The client is a mid-sized technology firm based in the UK. As the team grew, managing holiday requests became more of a headache than it should have been. People were sending leave requests over email, chasing their managers for a response, and HR had no clean way to keep track of it all.

What they wanted was pretty straightforward. A simple app where employees could submit a leave request, managers could approve or reject it, and everything would be tracked without anyone having to update a spreadsheet or send a follow-up email. They also wanted employees to get a calendar invite the moment their leave was approved so it would not get forgotten.

• Leave requests were going over email and sometimes just getting lost or ignored for days.
• Managers had no easy way to see all pending requests in one place.
• Employees had no idea how many days they had left without emailing HR to ask.
• Every time a request got approved, HR had to go and manually update the records. It was slow and mistakes happened.

We built a Holiday Request App for them using Power Apps, SharePoint, and Power Automate. They were already using Microsoft 365, so there was nothing new to buy. The solution simply plugged into their existing environment.

The Holiday Request Form

• On the left side of the canvas, the employee picks their name from a dropdown, selects a start date and end date, and adds any notes they want the manager to see.
• The moment they pick the dates, the app works out how many days that is and shows it straight away. No manual counting.
• On the right side there is a leave summary. It shows how many days the current request covers and how many days they still have left. It pulls from SharePoint in real time so the number is always right.
• Once they are happy with it, they hit Submit Request. That writes everything to SharePoint and the Power Automate flow starts running straight away.

Power Automate Approval Flow

• As soon as a new request hits SharePoint, Power Automate picks it up and starts the approval process without anyone having to do anything. The manager receives an email containing the employee's name, leave dates, and request duration. They can approve or reject the request directly from their inbox without opening the app.
• If they approve it, SharePoint gets updated to show the request as approved and the employee's remaining days get recalculated automatically.
• The employee then gets a confirmation email saying their leave is approved, and attached to that email is an ICS calendar file. They click it and the dates go straight into their calendar. Done.
• If the manager rejects it, the status updates to rejected in SharePoint, the leave days stay as they were, and the employee gets an email letting them know.
• From the moment the request is submitted to the moment the employee gets their confirmation or rejection, HR does not need to do a thing.

Calendar Integration

• When a request is approved, Power Automate builds an ICS file with the leave dates in it and attaches it to the confirmation email.
• The employee clicks the attachment and the dates are added directly to their calendar Outlook Calendar. Their time off is blocked out straight away and their colleagues can see it.
• The client specifically asked for this. They were fed up with people getting approval emails and then forgetting to block out the time. The ICS file means they never have to think about it.
• And because it goes into shared calendars, managers and teammates can see who is off without having to ask.