Create a 'pending approval' app object

I'm only particularly familiar with Laravel, but perhaps I can at least help your thinking in the right direction.

I'm just kind of thinking out loud here... I don't necessarily think that the status of declined is temporary. What if you had a jobstatus stable that was essentially a join table between your job and your employee. This was you could see which employees declined the job before it was accepted. You could also right a method in your job model that would take the relationship to see if the job itself had been accepted (by checking to see if any of the users it had been sent to approved it). Does that help? If you're not wanting to keep any of that history that you could just keep the status on the job itself, but you'd want to know which users it had already been sent to so the same people don't continue to get the request and decline it.

I think this is really a database project. Each employee would be in a table with a unique identifier. Each task would be in a table with a unique identifier. This is where I run into the limitations of my database structure work. I think you would have a table that links a task to an employee who was invited to that task. Then you would have a table with the result (accept or decline). If it is in the invite table but not the result, it would be pending. You would then use PHP to process all of the information.