very difficult code - program

hi everyone,

i am facing a sitution, in developing an employee system. plz help me coding following problem, i have not been able to write a suitable code for it.

An employee fills in a leave request, a record is created for the request. This request doc goes to his supervisor for approval. In case he does not reply within say 5 "working days", then his case is escalated to someone higher in the org. hierarchy. So we need to calculate the escalation period automatically, and writes to file appropriately.
Then the system picks up all the unapproved requests, calculates the time elapsed (ie time since no action has been taken on the request), ...
.and if its elapsed 5 "working days", it writes some text (say pending request) to a file. Now these working days can be Mon-Fri or Mon-Sat.

this is the situation i am facing, but i am unable to code it properly,
plz help me with a suitable code.

homework assignment?

Lets break it down into its parts:
1) Emplyee fills a leave request
2) Record is created
3) Request goes to the supervisor
4) Supervisior can take action or not.
5) If not and 5 days have elapsed move the record to someone higher
6) Make a note on the request.

Sounds like a good problem for some database programming :)

Now which part do you have a problem with. And how far have you gotten?