How to read these diagrams
Each diagram is a pool divided into lanes, one lane per actor. A box sits in the lane of whoever does that step — so the shape of the picture answers the question people actually have, which is whose move is it. Read left to right; the dashed warm lines are the refusals, and they are drawn deliberately because on every one of these processes the refusal is the branch people forget exists.
One convention worth internalising. Validation always happens before routing, never after approval. A manager should never be asked to approve leave the employee has no balance for, or an advance whose instalments would breach the 25% ceiling — approving something the system must then refuse to execute is worse than refusing it up front, because by then the employee has been told yes.
The arc
Everything below is a magnification of one step in this picture. The detail worth noticing now is the last arrow: re-hire returns to the same file rather than creating a new one, and that single decision is what makes total service — the number the ten-year leave tier and the end-of-service gratuity both turn on — computable at all.
Becoming an employee
A manager asks for a post; approval creates the requisition; a candidate becomes a file.
5 processesAt work
Attendance, leave, pay, advances, documents — the loops that repeat for years.
6 processesGrowing, and going wrong
Appraisal, learning, transfer — and discipline, which the law constrains hardest.
4 processesLeaving and returning
Resignation or abandonment, clearance, settlement — and the way back in.
4 processesBecoming an employee
Hiring begins before recruitment does. The person who knows a post is short is the manager holding it, not the recruiter — so the first process is the manager's, and the requisition recruitment works from is what its approval produces. That ordering is the point: a requisition can never exist without the authorisation that created it.
1.1 · طلب احتياج — asking for a post
Why a backfill must name who is leaving. It is not bookkeeping. Naming the leaver is the evidence that headcount is not growing, and that single fact is the difference between a decision a budget holder can make in a minute and one that needs a meeting.
1.2 · Advert to shortlist
1.3 · The hand-off out of recruitment
1.4 · The first days
Probation is set here, and can never be set again. Art. 90 allows a probationary period once per employee per employer. The re-hire process (7.1) has nowhere to express one, which is deliberate — see the last diagram in this guide.
The request spine
Nineteen kinds of request — leave, advance, letter, mission, resignation, objection, manpower and the rest — all run on one spine. Learning it once means every request diagram after this is just the middle box changing.
The rule that would refuse the request is tested at submission, in the requester's own language. A refusal that names the balance, the ceiling or the deadline is actionable; one that arrives after three approvals is an insult.
Approvals arrive on a bus that delivers at least once, and a reconcile job re-offers anything unfinished. Applying twice is not an edge case — it is expected traffic, and every effect is keyed so it cannot double-deduct someone's leave or schedule the same advance twice.
At work
These are the loops that run for years without anyone thinking about them, which is exactly why their edge cases matter more than the showpiece features.
3.1 · A day, and what the fence actually says
geography; containment is STIntersects and nearness is STDistance.The verdict is three-valued, and that is the whole design. A GPS fix is a circle, not a point. "Inside the boundary, accurate to ±400 m" is not evidence that somebody was at work, so the answer is Inside, Uncertain, or Outside. Uncertain means the phone could not tell us — a different fact from the employee not being there, and the one that has to survive to an argument about a deduction eight months later.
Nothing blocks. Mocked-location and impossible-travel signals are recorded and sent to a review queue, never used to refuse a punch. A spoofing heuristic that blocks hurts an honest employee with a bad phone long before it inconveniences anyone actually cheating, and the two mistakes do not cost the same.
Location is read only when a button is pressed, never between punches. That is a product decision, stated on the employee's screen rather than in a policy nobody opens.
3.2 · Leave
3.3 · The payroll month
Why the calculation trace is stored rather than recomputed. When an employee or an inspector disputes a deduction two years later, the engine will have changed — re-running it proves nothing. The stored trace is the only thing that shows which employment record, which insurable-wage clamp, which tax ladder and which statutory cap produced that number.
3.4 · An advance
3.5 · Documents and their expiry
The half that used to be missing. The system tracked expiry, warned before it, and raised a compliance flag when a mandatory document was absent — while giving the person being chased no way to respond. Chasing somebody for a document they cannot submit is a process that only produces flags.
3.6 · Transfer and promotion
Growing
4.1 · An appraisal cycle
4.2 · Learning
When it goes wrong
Discipline is the process Egyptian labour law constrains hardest, and the one where software most easily produces something indefensible. Two rules void a sanction, and one of them is counted from a date most people get wrong.
A single violation is capped at five days' wage. The form checks it as the days are typed and refuses to save past it, rather than letting an unlawful penalty reach an employee's payslip and be argued about afterwards.
A discipline system that can impose a sanction but never hear an objection is half the law. تظلم is an ordinary request kind — a chain, a decision, a visible history — and upholding it annuls the sanction. Except one already carried into a payslip: the money left, and unwinding it is a retro adjustment, not a status flip that would leave payslip and penalty disagreeing.
The employee can see the sanction. Not a courtesy — a precondition. Nobody objects to something they were told about verbally and cannot point at, so a right to object that exists only on paper is no right at all.
Leaving
Service can end three ways in this platform: the employee resigns, the employer terminates, or absence accumulates until the law treats it as abandonment. All three converge on one end-of-service case.
6.1 · Resignation
6.2 · Absence that becomes abandonment
6.3 · Clearance and settlement
Approval is the moment employment ends, and it does four things at once: it closes the employment period, stops the assignment on the same day, flips the employee to Terminated, and releases the settlement to payroll. Stopping the assignment matters more than it looks — approval routing reads the org chart, and a terminated employee still sitting in a department would keep receiving other people's requests to approve.
The settlement is shown broken out rather than as one figure, because each component is owed for a different reason: gratuity for service, notice where it was not served, compensation where the ending was unlawful, and the leave cash-out that art. 125 makes mandatory on termination. An employee disputing one of them is disputing that line, not the total.
Coming back
A returning employee is the case that quietly tests whether the whole model was built correctly, because getting it wrong is invisible for years and then wrong in the one calculation that matters most.
Total service is the number that decides the thirty-day annual leave tier at ten years, and the end-of-service gratuity. Two files means both are computed from the wrong figure — and nothing looks broken until somebody leaves after eleven years and is paid as though they had six.
Art. 90 allows probation once per employee per employer, and it was used on the first period. A returning employee cannot be put back on trial however long they were away, so the form has nowhere to say otherwise — the rule is enforced by absence rather than by a validation message.
And the loop closes. The re-hired employee re-enters phase 2 at exactly the same place as a new joiner — attendance, leave, payroll, appraisal — with one difference nobody has to remember, because the file already knows it.
The law, by gateway
Every diamond above that refuses something refuses it for a reason. These are the reasons, and the process each one lives in.
| Rule | What it decides | Where it fires |
|---|---|---|
| Art. 69 | Absence becomes abandonment only after the ladder and a registered letter | 6.2 Abandonment |
| Art. 90 | Probation once per employee per employer — never on a re-hire | 1.3 Offer · 7.1 Re-hire |
| Art. 92 | The employee file is kept five years after service ends, electronically | 3.5 Documents |
| Art. 114 | Advance recovery may not exceed 25% of the wage, counting instalments already running | 3.4 Advance |
| Art. 121 | Overtime multipliers, and the substitute rest day that a payment does not discharge | 3.1 Attendance |
| Art. 125 | Unused leave is cashed out on termination — mandatory, not optional | 6.3 Settlement |
| Art. 128 | Casual leave is drawn from the annual balance, capped per occasion | 3.2 Leave |
| Art. 139 | The sanction ladder a penalty must sit on | 5 Discipline |
| Art. 140 · 143 | Thirty days from the close of investigation; five days' wage per violation | 5 Discipline |
| Law 14/2025 leave tiers | 21 days rising to 30 at ten years' service or age 50 | 3.2 Leave |
Standing gate before any live payroll. The statutory formulas — the six tax ladders, the social-insurance wage clamp, the health-insurance phases and the end-of-service gratuity — are implemented from the published rules but have not been reviewed by an Egyptian accountant and lawyer. That sign-off is required before a real tenant runs live payroll, and the statutory configuration screen says so on the page rather than in a tooltip.