Volunteers can mark themselves unavailable directly through Volaby, but there are times when you'll need to do it on their behalf. Your organisation also has several settings that control how much of this is in the volunteers' hands, and how far in advance they can submit it.
Marking unavailability for a volunteer
You can add, edit or remove leave periods for any volunteer from their profile.
Navigate to the volunteer's profile
Scroll to the Availability section
Click Availability Centre
Choose Unavailability & Leave
Add, edit or remove the date ranges
Click Submit
The effect is the same as if the volunteer had set it themselves — they'll be marked unavailable for rostering across every activity they're enrolled in for those dates, and any availability they'd already submitted for those dates is removed.
You'll need to be an Activity Leader for an activity the volunteer is on, a Program Manager for a program they're in, or a Volaby Admin to manage availability on their behalf.
Organisation-wide settings
Volaby has three settings that shape how volunteers can submit availability and leave. All three live in Admin Console > Operations.
Restrict Availability Submission
Limits how far in advance volunteers can submit availability. When enabled, you set a Maximum Days in Advance value between 7 and 365 days. Any date beyond that window is locked in the volunteer view — they won't see Available/Unavailable options for it in My Rosters or in the Availability Centre calendar.
Best for organisations that build rosters in fixed windows (for example, a fortnight or a month at a time) and don't want volunteers submitting availability for dates that aren't relevant yet.
This restriction applies to both positive availability and per-roster unavailability. It doesn't affect leave periods submitted through Unavailability & Leave, which can still be set for any future date.
Prevent Availability Submission
Hides the Availability Centre from the volunteer view and stops volunteers from submitting, updating or withdrawing availability. Activity Leaders, Program Managers and Admins can still manage availability and unavailability on a volunteer's behalf as normal.
Best for organisations that run their rostering entirely manager-driven and don't want volunteers self-indicating.
Allow Unavailability & Leave
This setting sits directly under Prevent Availability Submission and only appears once that's on. When enabled, volunteers keep access to a cut-down Unavailability & Leave centre — they can submit, edit and remove their own leave periods, but still can't set positive availability. The button in the top right of their screen is labelled Unavailability & Leave instead of Availability Centre.
Best for organisations that want manager-driven rostering but still want volunteers to tell them when they'll be away without having to call or email.
The three configurations of Prevent / Allow
Both off (the default) — volunteers can set both availability and leave through the full Availability Centre
Prevent on, Allow off — volunteers can't submit anything; managers handle it all
Prevent on, Allow on — volunteers can submit leave periods only; managers handle positive availability
Seeing volunteer unavailability
When a volunteer has unavailability set — whether they added it themselves or you did it for them — it shows up in a few places:
On the volunteer's profile in the Availability section
On the Rosters page when you're building a roster for dates that overlap with their leave, so you know not to assign them
On the volunteer's own My Elements dashboard and My Rosters tab, as leave period cards
Cross-links
Volunteers - Marking Unavailability and Leave — the volunteer-facing guide
How to Roster — how availability and unavailability show up when building rosters
Volunteers - Indicating Your Availability — the positive-availability flow