Grant compliance exceptions

Someone on sick leave should not be nudged, escalated, or counted against the compliance rate. A compliance exception covers exactly that: a temporary, date-bounded exemption with a reason attached, granted for one person and revocable at any time.

Exception or permanent exemption?

Onplana has both, and they serve different cases:

• Permanent exemptions live in the enforcement settings: exempt roles (Guests by default) and per-user exempt flags. They have no end date and are right for people who will never file timesheets, like executives or external observers.
• Exceptions have a start date, an end date, and a required reason. They are right for sick leave, sabbaticals, parental leave, or a new hire’s first weeks. They expire on their own, and both granting and revoking one is recorded.

For the weeks an exception covers, the person derives as Exempt on every compliance surface: the dashboards skip them, reminders and escalation chains pass over them, and the hard lock does not fire for them.

Grant an exception

1. Open Organization Settings → Configuration → Timesheets and find the Timesheet exceptions panel.

2. Start a new grant and pick the member. Guests are not offered, since they are already outside the compliance roster.

3. Set the from and to dates. Both ends are inclusive, and the exception applies to any week the range touches.

4. Enter the reason. It is required, and it is what an auditor reads later to understand why those weeks were excused.

5. Confirm. The exception takes effect immediately.

Revoke an exception

If plans change, revoke the exception from the same panel. Revocation is deliberately non-destructive: the record stays, marked with when it was revoked and by whom, so the history of “exempt from these dates, then revoked on that date” can always be reconstructed.

Note

Every grant and every revoke writes an audit log entry with the person, the date range, and the reason. These entries are included in compliance evidence exports, which is how you prove to an auditor that missing weeks were approved absences rather than silent gaps.

FAQs

Who can grant and revoke exceptions? Owners and Admins by default, via the compliance management permission. It is configurable in the permissions matrix. Auditor access tokens cannot manage exceptions; they are read-only by design.

Can an exception cover a week in the past? Yes. Backdating an exception is the standard way to clear a hard lock or an escalation for a week that was missed for a legitimate reason.

Does an exception hide the person’s logged hours? No. Any hours they did log remain visible everywhere; the exception only changes their compliance status to Exempt for the covered weeks.