Leave requests

General

• We’re nervous about putting in an online leave request system as it will impact every employee in the organisation. How much training is required for employees? For managers?

  We’ve worked hard to ensure that employees and managers need as little training as possible. We also tried to make sure that the leave request just needs to capture the minimum amount of information possible in order to action a leave request.

  For example, if an employee wants two weeks leave, then all we really want them to physically enter is that they are taking annual leave for two weeks. They shouldn’t be expected to remember how this ties into their current work patterns, or how it ties into public holidays or weekends. At the end of the day they just trying to say that they are requesting two weeks leave, and this is the intention of the request even if their work pattern changes between now and taking the time off.

  So unless they are taking partial days work of leave, there is no need for the employee in a leave request to say how many hours or the start/end times of the leave. Just the leave reason by itself is perfectly acceptable.

  Read this article to hear how we've dealt with the more complex areas of leave requests, such as partial days, linking leave to the employee's roster, dealing with hourly and daily leave types and many more!

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• Can the leave request form be modified to suit our organisation? If so, what does this involve?

  We’ve viewed leave requests as being very similar to other forms of time, like a timesheet, or their usual work pattern in terms of configuration. So all the flexibility you have with timesheeting, you have with leave requests.

  So:

  • Huge range options over what can be shown on each leave request
  • You can show different leave types depending on the type of employee you are looking at, plus other variable factors depending on whether you are logged in as an employee, logged in as a manager, or as a manager looking at your own leave request etc. All easily configurable, and totally your choice.
  • You can limit the security on each leave request layout… for example for one group of employees; they may only have a limited range of leave request reasons available. For another group of employees it might be slightly different again. But if it is the manager filling out something for any of those groups, you might want a larger set of available leave reasons that can be used. It’s really down to your organisational needs more than anything.
  • Full control over the business rules that can be calculated to figure out whether a request is valid, plus control over alerts displayed to employee and managers.
  • A range of ways you can notify managers and employees via email when the status of a request has changed… for example when it is submitted, approved, withdrawn, or declined etc. Messages can be customised for each type of status change, for different groups of employees, and different again depending on whether it is triggered in real time as the request goes through its workflow, or through a reminder action. There is a lot of flexibility here!

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• E-mail notifications will be an important part of the leave request process. How does this work, and can it be modified?

  Yes definitely. The content of emails is something that most organisations want to have a high degree of control over, and there can be huge variations between clients in terms of requirements. We’ve embraced this need for flexibility and made sure that our e-mail notification framework is totally tied into our business rule engine, to provide maximum control.

  So for example, any employee field can be used within the notification system, either as a field that turns up in the email, or as something that helps differentiate one kind of email from another. But we go much further than that. Information about the leave request itself may also be used as part of the e-mail. For example you may wish to differentiate between a straight leave request and a work request, or you may wish to differentiate between different kinds of leave within the request.

  We can do that because the same business rule engine that is used to calculate payments and warnings is available to the email notification engine. This can go as far as looking into the raw leave request (which is usually the minimum information needed), as well as the employees' times when the leave request has been automatically placed into their planned week, or pay period. This is quite unique for leave management, and is extremely powerful.

  We can also do things differently depending on whether the user is a regular employee, a manager, or a system user. So if the user is an employee creating a request for themselves, the email notification can send the email to their manager, and not themselves. If they are a manager logging in, then you might do things differently again, including dealing with them as a normal employee if they are filling in their own leave request.

  In addition to e-mail notifications occurring at the time requests are submitted, approved, declined, withdrawn etc, there is also a concept of reminders where at a certain date you can mass e-mail for various forms of outstanding leave requests, or even approved leave that you just want managers to check that it did in fact get taken. You are in control of what the criteria is here, and what is said. We also have the ability in reminders, particularly for managers, to consolidate emails so that if one of the emails is more of a general reminder, that we don’t send the same general reminder for each outstanding leave request.

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• Does TimeFiler retain leave request history?

  Yes, we keep all history, and this can be viewed retrospectively in the calendar views, or the ‘my timesheet/request’ style views. In this respect, it is no different to any of our timesheet/request categories like actual timesheet information, or the work patterns. It is all just time at the end of the day, and is stored in exactly the same place in the TimeFiler database under different categories.

  Once a leave request has been withdrawn, or declined it will become hidden from general use as if it were deleted. But it does in fact remain in the database, and there is also a history feature allowing access to these timesheets/requests if an old request must be located.

  We also retain a full history of the status changes that have occurred throughout the life of the request in terms of when and who created, submitted, approved timesheets and requests (as well as the less common declined/withdrawn statuses).

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• We want to ensure employees don’t apply for leave types for which they don’t have a balance. How can TimeFiler read leave balances from our payroll system?

  We have some fantastic synchronisation interfaces that allow synchronisation with many payroll systems with a click of a button. This typically means that there is almost no record maintenance required. TimeFiler can happily accept user-definable fields into almost any of its supporting entities, including of course the all important employee entity, and this information can come across easily in the sychronisation from payroll.

  Timesheets and requests can also show leave fields, including user-definable leave fields, as well as other areas of the system, for example, any employee field.

  Once in TimeFiler, these fields may be used in our business rule engine to assist with paying employees, or validating leave requests, or timesheets. This information is also available to the e-mail notification framework through the same business rule engine if you want to tie leave information into the content of the email response to the leave request.

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• Can TimeFiler display leave balances for the employee as they apply for leave?

  Absolutely, including as discussed above, user-definable leave information that has come across automatically from payroll can be used just like any other permanent field in TimeFiler.

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• Can managers see at a glance who is on leave and who is working, so they have sufficient information in order to approve / decline a leave request?

  Yes. Typically managers will need to see a view showing all of their employees and what they are doing at the time, including any leave requests that have been submitted, already approved, or those underway. We have a great dashboard for doing that which is a monthly or weekly calendar view of your employees, with a detail level below it showing the persons leave request when you click into it (or their current work pattern for those dates when there isn’t a leave request to view). From there the manager has some pretty simple actions available such as ‘approve’, or ‘decline’.

  For managers who are responsible for a lot of employees, we have ability for them to see just their immediate reports, or 2 or 3+ levels below. This means for leave management, they can just focus on their immediate reports in the first instance, but see more of their employees when they require it, for example making sure there are replacements outside of immediate reports.

  Employees would normally have a very similar view, but it only shows them of course. Again they have quite simple actions such as ‘create’, ‘submit’, or ‘withdraw’ a leave request.

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Functionality

• We have many leave types in our organisation, and some are in hours, and some are in days. Can this be handled in TimeFiler?

  Yes, we deal with this a lot, and it doesn’t need to be painful.

  The TimeFiler business rules engine is flexible enough to convert different unit types (hours, days or weeks) when it comes to adding things up, or paying things out.

  And just as there are a variety of ways of saying “what is a day”, TimeFiler has a matching variety of ways of achieving that. So far we haven’t seen a scenario we can’t do. Whether we need to look at employee fields, use a formula of some kind, refer to expected work patterns, or even past timesheet history, we’ve got this covered.

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Timesheets

Pricing & billing