Tag Archives: vacation approvals

TimeRequest Wizard

TimeControl’s TimeRequest Wizard is truly magical

TimeControl has long had the ability to allow employees to request time off in the future using the TimeRequest feature.  Employees make a request for time off for an event such a vacation or expected sick leave and that goes to their supervisor for approval much like a timesheet would.  Then, once approved, that timesheet entry including the number of hours involved, the charge code and the rate code are automatically inserted into the appropriate timesheet.  If, for some reason, the employee goes to work on that day, they can just overwrite the entry with other timesheet lines.

An extension to the TimeRequest function is the TimeRequest Wizard.  This module allows an administrator to add pre-approved TimeRequest timesheet lines to many employee’s future timesheets at once.  It is most typically used for entering statutory holidays such as New Year’s Day or Christmas.

The TimeRequest Wizard has recently been enhanced with some great new features.

Administrators can set up different TimeRequest Wizard entries and then save them for later updating.  This means that one TimeRequest Wizard entry could be made for example for all the holidays in the US and associated with a filter for US-based staff then a different TimeRequest Wizard entry could be made for all Canadian holidays and associated with a filter for all staff based in Canada.

Since TimeRequest Wizards are now saved, they can also now be recalled and edited.  This provides an easy way for TimeControl administrators to onboard new staff with future holidays and to offboard staff so there is nothing still pending for their timesheets in the future.

The TimeRequest Wizard is an easy way for administrators to save a ton of time.  You can see the online lesson of the TimeRequest Wizard in action on the TimeControl Online Training page at:  timecontrol.com/resources/online-training/timecontrol-8.

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.