Set up time off

Warning: It is important to get your settings right before employees start making time off requests. Here's how to configure the system properly.

Set up holiday accrual rules

1. Login as the admin user
2. Select Time off on the Settings menu
3. The top half of this page defines how employees’ time off will be accrued. There are normally five different ‘configs’ available. For example, you can have one config for full time employees, another for part-timers and another for executives.
4. Select a config from the drop-down menu
   • Change the name if you like (for example ‘Part-timer configuration’)
   • The first box allows you define how many days employees with this config get each year 
   • You can also give employees the option to borrow extra days. This can be useful if you accrue on a monthly basis and so in the early part of the holiday year, employees don’t have enough accrued days to book a reasonable holiday.
   • There are two options for defining the holiday year. Either everyone’s holiday year starts on the anniversary of their start date or it is on the same day every year for everyone, e.g. January 1 or the end of the financial year.
   • Then you have to decide whether to accrue monthly or annually. If you accrue monthly, employees accrue one-twelfth of their annual allowance at the beginning of each month. If it’s annually, they get the whole allowance on the first day of the holiday year.
   • The next option defines what happens at the end of the holiday year. Do any untaken holiday days rollover into the new year or do you operate a ‘use it or lose it’ approach to vacation days? Here’s where you decide.

Set up categories

1. Underneath the accruals settings there is a list of six different time off types. You can change the labels to match your own company’s terminology. One man’s ‘holiday’ is another’s ‘personal time off’, for example. Click on the pencil icon to edit the name.
2. Then click Save to save the changed name.
3. The first column of tick boxes (‘On/Off’) simply enables or disables that holiday type so that it appears in the holiday request form.
4. The second column of tick boxes (‘Accrued’) determines whether that category is counted against the employee’s accrued time off or just counted separately. Warning: don’t change this setting lightly.

Setup blackout days

You may want to stop people booking holidays on weekends or bank holidays. The blackouts section lets you do this. Selected days cannot be booked – literally can’t be selected – as time off days.

To select a given day of the week as a blackout day, tick the box by the day.

To select an individual day, such as 25 December, just click on the day in the calendar. Note that individual days do not repeat – you have to click on December 25 this year, next year and so on.

Then click Save.

Apply time off configs to different users

1. Log in as the admin user
2. Click on Employees to see a list of all your staff
3. Select each employee in turn
4. Click on Statistics
5. On the statistics page, it shows the current config right under ‘Statistics for [Name]’
6. To change the config, just click on the pencil icon next to current config and select the required config from the drop down list

Set up approval rules

Team managers approve time off requests for people in their terms.