Summer is here. Holidays are booked, the out-of-office replies are stacking up, and somewhere in your organisation, a change request or purchase approval is about to sit untouched for two weeks because the one person who needs to sign it off is on a beach somewhere.
It happens every year. And for most organisations, the answer has been the same: manual workarounds, frantic WhatsApp messages, or simply waiting. None of those are great options when you’re running an IT service desk that’s supposed to keep things moving.
Halo’s Q4 2025 release quietly introduced a feature that solves this — and most people haven’t noticed it yet. It’s called Automatic Approval Delegation for Out-of-Office Users, and when it’s set up properly, it means your approval workflows just keep running, whether your approvers are in the office or sitting by a pool in Tenerife.
Approval delegation in Halo isn’t brand new. You’ve always been able to set a delegate manually, on a per-user basis. What’s changed in this release is the trigger: delegation can now activate automatically when a user is marked as Out of Office in Halo.
That’s a meaningful shift. Previously, someone had to remember to configure it. Now, as part of your standard OOO process, the delegation just kicks in. The approver goes out of office, their approvals route to their delegate, and the ticket keeps moving.
No chasing. No blocked queues. No SLA breaches because someone forgot to set a cover.
Navigate to: Clients/Customers > Users > [select the user] > Preferences Tab > Approval Processes
Here you’ll see the setting: “Approval delegation when out of office”.
Toggle this on and set two things:
This is a user-level setting, so it’s flexible. One approver might always delegate to the same deputy; another might change it per trip. Both are supported.
This is the bit most people miss. The delegation setting alone doesn’t activate anything. It only kicks in when the user is actually marked as Out of Office in Halo.
Halo has a dedicated Out of Office Detection function. You can mark a user as OOO manually in their record, or feed it automatically from a calendar integration.
Once both are in place — delegate set, OOO status active — Halo does the rest.
While you’re in the approval process settings, it’s worth reviewing a couple of supporting features:
Auto-Approval notifications: At each approval process step, if the step approver is determined by rules, you can configure an automatic notification email when a step is auto-approved. This is useful for keeping visibility — even if someone doesn’t need to act, they may want to know.
Email Approvers system action: This action automatically populates the “To” field with everyone who has previously approved a step on the same approval process. It’s a clean way to loop in all relevant parties without manually tracking who approved what.
Both are found under Configuration > Tickets > Approval Processes.
Setting a delegate is currently done one user at a time in the UI. If you have a team of 20 approvers all going on leave across July and August, that’s 20 separate records to update — and 20 more to clear when they return.
The Halo API exposes a /api/Users endpoint that allows you to update user records programmatically. A lightweight PowerShell or Python script can read your holiday roster from a spreadsheet, push the delegation preferences to each user before they leave, and clear them on return. This is something Hikon can help you build as part of a broader automation layer.
When delegation kicks in, the delegate isn’t automatically told. Fix this with a Halo Workflow or Automation Rule: trigger it on the OOO flag being set, and use the “Email Approvers” system action to send the delegate a heads-up — ideally with a direct link to their pending approvals queue. It takes about 30 minutes to configure and removes a genuine failure point.
If the delegate is also unavailable or simply doesn’t action the approval in time, there’s currently no out-of-the-box escalation. Address this with Halo’s ticket rules: if an approval step has been pending for more than X hours and the ticket priority is above a certain threshold, escalate to a defined fallback approver and send an alert.
Use Halo’s multi-table join reporting (introduced in Q1 2025) to build a delegation audit report. Tag delegated approvals using a custom field on the approval action, then pull this into a scheduled report that goes to your IT Manager or Service Delivery Manager each month.
This week:
Before each person goes on leave:
As a longer-term improvement:
Approval bottlenecks don’t just cause frustration — they have real business impact. A change request that should take two hours to approve can end up taking two weeks if the approver is away and no cover is in place. For organisations running ITIL-aligned processes, that delay touches SLAs, change management reporting, and ultimately the confidence stakeholders have in the service desk.
Halo has given you the tool to fix this. The delegation feature, combined with a small amount of workflow configuration, makes your approval process genuinely resilient to the reality of human schedules.
At Hikon, we work with organisations across the UK and Israel to get the most out of their Halo implementation — not just at go-live, but as the platform evolves. If you’d like help configuring approval delegation, building the API automation layer, or reviewing your approval process design ahead of summer, we’d love to talk.
Get in touch at hikon.co.uk or reach out directly to the team.
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