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Web TimeSheet Time Off Tracking Showcase Transcript

Introduction

Visual Cues:
Title page with “Time Off Tracking Showcase” displays.

Time Off Challenges screen appears, displaying the following bullet points:

  • Overlapping holiday requests
  • Employees contacting you for balance information
  • Employees asking how much vacation they can take
  • Various other time off questions

Audio Cues:
Hello and welcome to the Replicon Web TimeSheet Time Off Showcase Video.

Audio Cues:
By now in the year you’re probably through your holiday rush, and you’ve had to deal with a lot of overlapping holiday requests, users contacting you asking, how much balance do I have left, how much vacation can I take, and then you also have to deal with various other time off questions.

This pain point isn’t unique across companies and in today’s video, we’re going to take a look at strategies, in Web TimeSheet Time & Attendance Edition, that are going to prevent this from happening next year.

Overview of Time Off Features

Visual Cues:
Title page with “Time Off Tracking Showcase” displays.

Overview screen appears, displaying the following bullet points:

  • Setting up accrual policies
  • Using the shared calendar
  • Submitting time off requests
  • Setting up approval paths
  • Reviewing time off reports

Audio Cues:
Specifically, we’re going to take a look at:

  • Setting up accrual policies for users
  • We’re going to show you how to use the shared calendar within Web TimeSheet
  • We’re going to be submitting some time off requests from a user’s perspective
  • We’re going to set up approval paths
  • And then we’re going to take a look at some time off reports

Accrual Policies for Users

Visual Cues:
Time Off Calendar screen appears. Narrator navigates to the “Administration” option in the top menu, expands the menu bar on the left hand side, clicks the “Users” option under “Shortcuts”, and clicks on the admin user “Doug Brown”.

Narrator goes to the “Time Off” tab. Narrator scrolls down, displaying the current policies for the user.

Narrator stops at the “Vacation” policy and mouses over the details. Narrator highlights “Maximum Overdraw” detail.

Narrator scrolls up to “Family Emergency” policy and starts entering in the details for “Effective Date”, “Balance”, “Accrue” days, and “Reset” option. Narrator clicks “Done” and clicks the “Save” button to save the changes.

“List Users” screen displays again. Narrator clicks on the admin user again, goes into the “Time Off” tab and mouses over and highlights the “Banked Time” policy.

Audio Cues:
One of the first things you’re going to want to do to ensure accurate time off tracking is by setting up automated accruals. This is going to allocate the correct balances on a regular basis so you don’t have to manually update the system for each user, based on a certain calendar year or fiscal year.

So to do this, we’re just going to bring up the user list. We’re going to go into the “Admin” user profile (that’s who I’m logged in as now). Go to the “Time Off” tab and this is going to show us all of the time off codes that users have been set up to enter time towards.

Down at the bottom you’ll notice the vacation time off code. Here the policy has been set up to give this user 20 days on January 1 and then monthly accrue another quarter of a day.

The following year it’s going to reset to zero days and continue the accrual. There’s also an additional advanced rule here called “Maximum Overdraw” of 2. In some organizations where you want to accrue monthly, but you want to allow users to maybe take some more time or time off in the year, you can allow an “Overdraw” policy and let them overdraw and carry their balances into the negative until, of course, they accrue those values later on in the year.

We’re going to go ahead and set up a simple policy here, called “Family Emergency”. This organization’s policy is to give their employees 4 days a year, and its effective February. We’re going to go ahead and adjust that to January 1. Where not going to accrue any more days to this policy. The reset…we’ll have it reset every year on January 1, and have it reset to 4.

Clicking “Done” here and saving the user profile will mean I now have the ability to maintain a balance towards that family emergency time off code.

Now the nice thing about setting up these automatic accruals is those balances are presented to the user whenever they’re booking a time off request or when they’re entering time on a timesheet.

You’ll also notice the banked time off section at the top of the time off tab in the user profile. This is a special type of time off code that would take overtime amounts from timesheet and allocated them to a bucket that they could draw time off from.

Using the Shared Calendar

Visual Cues:
Narrator chooses “Time Off” option from the top menu. The time off calendar screen displays.

Narrator navigates to the “green” bar that indicates his requests that have been approved. Narrator navigates to the “yellow” bar that indicates his requests waiting for approval. Narrator navigates to the “Show Time Off From” drop down on the right hand side. Narrator clicks on “Select All” and calendar displays all requests from everyone in the company.

Audio Cues: Now if we navigate back to the time off calendar, we can take a look at where the user sees these balances. Now the initial view of this calendar we’re seeing here is showing only my requests. I can see by this yellow request at the bottom that it is actually waiting and not approved yet (course, the green requests mean approved). I also have the ability to see other shared departments within the system, on the calendar. So if I have a team perhaps, I can see all of their requests on this calendar, other teams I’m working with in my organization. I could see individuals that were out of the office and that is a permission that you can grant to the users you want to have it.

You can go ahead and select the other departments in the system, and you’ll see that other requests are then populated on the calendar.

Submitting Time Off Requests

Visual Cues:
Narrator selects February 24, 25, 26 from the time off calendar, the square being highlighted in yellow. Narrator chooses “Vacation” from the “Time Off” drop down from the right hand side.

Narrator mouses over the “12.81 days remaining” that is displayed and clicks the “Book Time Off” button.

The “Time Off Booking” screens displays. Narrator enters in the “Comments” section, “Trip to Vegas”. Narrator clicks the “Submit” button. The “Time Off Calendar” displays again. Narrator mouses over the “yellow bar” on February 24, 25, 26.

Audio Cues:
Now if I want to book time off, it’s at simple as choosing the days I want off with a click and a drag, choosing the code from the drop down. Here it’s already telling me that I will have 12.81 days remaining estimated if I take this 3 day booking. I click the “Book Time Off” button, and enter a trip to Vegas, choose to submit that request. I’ll see the request show up in yellow, indicating to me that it is waiting for approval.

Approval Paths

Visual Cues:
Narrator double clicks on the “yellow bar” on February 24, 25, 26, and the “Time Off Booking” screen displays.

Narrator mouses over the “Approval History”.

Audio Cues:
Double clicking any of the requests will bring up the details in the approval history, if there are multiple approvers on the request. You do have ability in the system, to set up to 5 levels of approvers, so in some users, you may want the approvals to go to their supervisor and then maybe an HR representative. Other users in the system, you may want their time off requests to simply go to the supervisor, or supervisor then HR, then payroll. It’s configurable on a user basis, so there’s lots of flexibility there as far as approvers go.

Time Off Reports

Visual Cues:
Narrator navigates to “Reports” option in the top menu. The “Select a Report” screen displays.

Narrator scrolls down and navigates to “Time Off Balance” report under the “Time Off Reports” section and clicks on it. The Time Off Balance Report screen displays.

Narrator clicks on the “Run Report” button, and the details of the report displays. Narrator mouses over the “Time Off Type”, “Time Off Taken”, and “Time Off Remaining” details.

Narrator expands the “Reports” menu on the left hand side. Narrator clicks on “User Time Off Settings” Report under “Time Off Reports”. The “User Time Off Settings” screen displays.

Narrator clicks on “Run Report” button and the report details display. Narrator mouses over “Time Off Type”, scrolls and mouses over “Accrual Amount”.

Narrator navigates to the left hand side and clicks on the “Time Off Liability” report under “Time Off Reports”. The “Time Off Liability” report screen displays.

Narrator clicks on “Run Report” button and the report details display. Narrator collapses the left hand menu, so more of the report can been seen. Narrator scrolls down and navigates to his vacation remaining, then mouses over the “Cost of Remaining Time Off”.

Audio Cues:
Now let’s go take a look a look at reports. We’re going to take a look at a few reports today. The first one we’re going to take a look at is really useful for both administrators and end users. If we scroll down to the time off reports, choose the time off balance report, go ahead and run that, you’ll notice here that I can see the time off types, their time off taken, and the time off remaining in days. From an administrative point of view, you can see what all of your teams or all of your user’s balances and if they’ve got a lot of outstanding time off. From an end user point of view, what they can do is that you can give them permission for this report and they will be only able to see their data, and they can run this as often as they like to see how their vacations are accruing, how much they have left for all their specific time off codes, and that saves a call to HR or their supervisor.

Now on the administrator side of things, you’ve gone through the system, you’ve set up maybe 20, 30, 40, 50 employees, all with different accruals, and you just want some kind of an audit to qualify that you’ve set things up correctly.

Here we can go and check out the “User Time Off Settings” report. If I go ahead and run that, you’ll notice that all of the time off settings, including the reset amount and the policy settings are outlined here. So I can quickly reference and make sure that many users are all entered correctly. You can group this report by user and then time off type, and so that you can see that everybody has the same policy settings as far as the time off type go. Again, by default, whenever you create a new user, their policies are going to be pre-setup as you’ve entered them, but you do have the ability to go in and modify each one individually if there are special case employees in your company.

The last report we’re going to want to take a look at is very important to the Financial and HR departments in your company. The “Time Off Liability” report. When I run this report, you’ll see it gives us information on the time off remaining hours, so if you’re going to release an employee from the company, it’s important to understand the liability associated with their outstanding time off hours. This case, you’ll see that my 144 hours of vacation means there is a $6000 liability to the company and that money is owed to me upon release if I haven’t taken those accrued vacation hours. A lot of finance people within organizations find this report very helpful.

Summary

Visual Cues:
Summary screen appears, displaying the following bullet points:

  • Set up accrual policies
  • Used the shared calendar to get visibility into time off
  • Submitted time off requests
  • Set up approval paths
  • Took a look at time off reports

Audio Cues:
That wraps up our video for today. We took a look at:

  • Setting up accrual policies for users
  • We talked about using the shared calendar so that people had visibility into time off requests throughout the organization
  • We’re actually submitted a time off request as a user and talked a little bit about different approval paths
  • And then finally we took a look at some time off reports within the system

Next Steps

Visual Cues: Next Steps screen displays, with a form to fill in for a Free Trial, a link for a Free Webinar and the following numbers and e-mail to Schedule a Personalized Demo:

North America: 1-877-762-6519
Europe & New Zealand: 00-800-7622-5192
Australia: 0011-800-7622-5192

E-mail: productexpert@replicon.com

Audio Cues:
So thank you for your time. I would encourage you that if you any questions to get in touch with us via the contact details that you are seeing now or go ahead and sign up directly on the screen for a trial instance, so you can test these hints out on your own. Thanks and have a great day.