Tag Archives: managing personal time off

timecontrol

The new Calendar View in TimeControl 7

TimeControl 7 sports a fancy new interactive feature called the Calendar View.  It is one of the features that is generating the most excitement for certain TimeControl users. Calendar_view.jpg

When we first designed the Calendar View we expected that it would be popular among users who wanted a graphical representation of their upcoming vacations and holidays as well as any assigned tasks.  We thought of it primarily as a personal view.

But, once we’d created the new view and started using it, the advantages of the view for Supervisors and Administrators overshadowed our original expectations.

Supervisors who have to approve future vacation have been able to do so for some time with TimeControl’s TimeRequest™ functionality. Users can request time off, the supervisors can accept or reject the request and administrators can even push holiday time for banked holidays to any selection or to all users.  So far that all sounds fine and TimeControl supervisor users have reported how happy they are with the function since it was first released years ago.

Now with the introduction of the Calendar View we are seeing a missing link in the approval process that we didn’t think about in the past.

The Calendar View allows a supervisor to visualize all the TimeRequests from their team simultaneously.  They can color code the view to show approved vacations, pending requests and even rejected requests on the same page.  Now, at a glance, a supervisor can determine if the new request for time off will conflict with other requests.  They can see the impact on how many team members might be absent at the same time and making the right decision about whether to accept or cancel the new request for time off is so much easier.

In some organizations it is key to also see if accepting time-off requests will conflict with tasks that are scheduled so the supervisor can also display tasks assigned to each of their team members at the same time.calendar_config_444x572

The View is flexible with numerous options for the display as you can see here.  The Calendar View is accessed from the reporting menu or directly from inside the TimeRequest screen.

The availability of the new Calendar View will make the process of time-off approvals much more effective and gives all users a new way to visualize their own personal TimeControl data.

For more information about what else is new with TimeControl, visit www.timecontrol.com/features/latest.

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FAQ: How do I control vacation entries?

We are often asked if TimeControl supports a method to ensure that employees don’t take more vacation time than they’ve been approved for.vacationtime_300x150.jpg

This is controlled in TimeControl two ways:

TimeRequest™
First, the approval of the timesheet is managed in the TimeRequest™  feature.  TimeRequest let’s employees request vacations in the future.  If the vacation is approved, the employee will be able to see that in the TimeRequest screen.  They can also be optionally notified by email through TimeControl and that email can automatically include a calendar notification to load into their Outlook or other calendar system.

TimeControl can then be configured to include a Validation Rule that says “You cannot enter vacation without a matching approved TimeRequest.”

Employee Banks
TimeControl also uses banks which can  be loaded for the entire year or loaded as time goes on through the TimeControl Accruals module to show vacation, personal time off, banked overtime, etc. that has been earned by this employee.

TimeControl has numerous banks created by default in the system which can be used for this purpose so different types of banks can be defined by the TimeControl Administrator. A TimeControl Validation Rule can then be created that generates an error if the amount of vacation taken in the current timesheet exceeds the amount in the bank for the vacation category.  Different organizations have different rules for this.  Some will allow only vacation that has been completely earned.  Others will allow an employee to be up to a week “negative” in their vacation bank.  Whatever the rule is, it can be defined for this in the Validation Rule.