Employee Attendance & Absence Times

Planning working hours in advance

With the categories “Office”, “Home Office” and “External”, or the vacation types, many aspects of time recording can already be covered. However, working hours cannot always be easily categorised. Is it necessary for an apprentice to book their time at vocational school to a general project? Wouldn’t it be useful if a colleague’s parental leave were visible in the calendar or resource planning?

Version 6.6 of projectfacts not only allows you to create your own categories of attendance time, vacation, or sick leave. You can also define what impact these categories have on your colleagues’ overtime or vacation accounts, for example.

Example: Absent due to vocational school

The time recording for apprentices serves as an example of the new possibilities. In most cases, apprentices previously recorded their attendance time under the “external” category. If your company also records project time at the same time, a separate “Vocational School” project had to be created to prevent the overtime account from going into the negative. For a colleague to see in the calendar whether an apprentice was in the office, an additional appointment had to be entered in the calendar.

Now an attendance category “Vocational School” can be created. A meaningful symbol and a distinct colour help to quickly recognise the apprentice’s availability in the colleague overview.

In the properties of the new category, you can also specify that these times are plannable – i.e. in this case the date and duration of the vocational school attendance. Recording the start and end time, on the other hand, is not of interest. The category should be marked as “relevant”. This notifies colleagues of these entries – for example in the calendar or the colleague overview.

Finally, the impact on time accounts: the time spent at vocational school should naturally be credited to the working time account. For the project time account, there is now the option of whether the apprentice should also book the time to a project or not. If these times are not further analysed or charged internally, it makes sense to deactivate the booking requirement for this category. Just as vacation and sick leave are not booked to projects, the same then applies in this example to vocational school.

With this configuration, apprentices can now plan their vocational school times in advance – for example under “Time Recording” – “Overview”. You can also enter the agreed daily working time under Duration – e.g. 8h.

In the calendar, the block classes are displayed uniformly, as is the colleague overview. Additional steps to book times after vocational school are no longer needed.

After updating to version 6.6 of projectfacts, the new options are available under “Configuration – Time Recording – Attendance/Absence Categories”. The example category can also be found there. Make sure that under “Configuration – Users & Permissions” in one of your user groups, under “Permissions – Configuration”, you have the right “Attendance times” in the “Time Recording” area. Otherwise the “Attendance/Absence Categories” tile will not be available to you.