A manager goes on holiday for two weeks. Without coverage there are only bad options: widen someone's territory permanently and forget to undo it, or accept that a region's alerts arrive on a phone in another country.
Coverage is the third option. For a window you choose, a stand-in receives alerts for the covered stores and can acknowledge them — acknowledging matters, because a stand-in who can only watch cannot stop an escalation.
- On the absent person's profile, create a coverage assignment.
- Choose who is covering, and the start and end dates.
- The stand-in's territory widens for that window and narrows again automatically when it ends.
- Coverage adds to the stand-in's territory; it never changes their role or what they can do.
- Escalation stays intact — if the stand-in doesn't respond, the chain still runs.
- The audit trail records that the stand-in acted on the absent person's behalf, which is what makes an incident review readable months later.
Coverage is capped at 30 days. Anything longer isn't an absence, it's a change of responsibility — and that should be a territory change you can see, not a temporary grant everyone forgot about.