Leave requests:
the pitfalls & how TimeFiler got it right

Leave request systems are great. They allow employees to apply for leave online, managers can then approve the leave - everyone is
happy.

But it can quickly become unstuck if the employee has future leave requests and his or
her standard work pattern changes. What happens to the leave request then?

And if the employee wants to apply for a partial day? What about long periods of leave which cross weekends and public holidays?

Things can become even further complicated with company policies such as a requirement that Time in Lieu balances are reduced before taking say Annual Leave. It shouldn't be up to the employee to know this when applying for leave. Starting to get the picture of how things can become unstuck without a very smart leave management system?

Keep it simple for the users

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 are 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 should be perfectly acceptable.

Handle partial leave days well

We have also put a lot of thought into partial days when it is needed.

Again we want to make it as easy as possible for employees and managers.

So the employee states either the hours or start/end times of the partial leave (depending
on organisational requirements), and again this request is independent of the work patterns
that might exist at the time (and again could change in between).

Let the business engine do the hard work

From this basic amount of information, our business rules engine can do all the heavy lifting in terms of figuring out how it tied into their work patterns, and any effect of public holidays and weekends, and anything else for that matter. You can comfortably throw a lot of complexity at it if your organisation demands it… for example figuring out that they don’t have enough annual leave, and realizing it will need to be paid out with other forms of leave in a cascading sort of manner… and what if you have different kinds of leave that are stored in hours or days? Our business rule engine can quite happily soak this complexity up. And what if the employees work pattern changes to the point that their work day no longer coincides with the leave request (either full day or partial day)? This is no problem… the business rule engine will take that into account.

Integrates with timesheet

When it comes to filling in the timesheet, the leave request information will be automatically copied into the timesheet by default. If you are using the timesheet to pay your employees, then the same business rules used to validate the leave request can be the same business rules used to pay the employee for all their time including leave. We can also put in place business rules that check that the leave in the leave request matches what is in the timesheet amongst all the other timesheet information.

TimeFiler fits in with your organisation (not the other way round)

Since TimeFiler has a vast amount of flexibility and control, we can craft it completely to your organisational needs.

In this way employees and managers just need
to do the minimum and in a way they will intuitively understand.

No more, and no less because it is no longer
necessary to pander to the limitations of your leave management system.

 

TimeFiler rules engine

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