One of the most important aspects of running a business is managing and approving your employees' time off. This could be a vacation, a sick day, or simply a day off. Accurately managing time off however is far from easy and if you are spending a lot of time trying to track & manage days off using pen and paper, then you’re far from accurate. A part of an all-and-one solution, Connecteam's time off feature lets you see approved time off in the schedule, and on your employee's time sheets. Providing full digitization of the time off process, there are no calculations needed. It's completely transparent to both you and your employees making the management process easier than ever!

Now let's dive into this exciting feature. In this article, we will go over.

Accurately managing time off is incredibly important following reasons:

The first step to managing time off is to activate the feature. This can be done by navigating to the Time Off feature on the left sidebar and clicking activate. Now you are inside the time off dashboard, which is where you will manage and track everything related to time off.

To the right, is where you set your policies time off policies These are paid and unpaid policies, and in both categories, we can click on + Add Type to create different policy types, such as time off, sick leave jury duty, and so on.

Take a look at the different policy types below. After choosing a policy type, you will be able to click on + Add Policy and add individual policies to your policy types (we will go over how to do this below).

In the example below you can see I created three policy types. Time Off and Sick Leave are under the paid policies and unpaid leave is under the unpaid policies.

Now that you understand the basics of creating a policy type let's take a look at our dashboard!

On the left side, you can see approved time off. You can select a policy and get an overview of each user assigned to the policy. You can see their number of requests, approved hours or days, and current. Here, you can also gain insights into each of the policies and see your pending requests.

On the right side, is where you set your time off policies and where you can add time off on behalf of users. There are paid and unpaid policies, in both categories we can click on + Add Type to create different policy types, such as time off, sick leave jury duty, and so on.

When it comes to time off each of your employees should know and understand, from the first day they start working what the policies are regarding time off. These policies should be clear and accessible to your employees. They should know exactly how much time off they receive if it's paid or unpaid, and their current balance. When it's a hassle for employees to access and see their time off balance it causes unnecessary back and forth between the employee and the person responsible for tracking time off. This demonstrates that time off is not a priority to the company which can hamper employee productivity.

With Connecteam, you can set policies on the left side and these can be either paid or unpaid and each is set in the exact same way. Now, before we begin it's important to note that setting policies is divided into four parts. These are setting the policy details, settings, assignments, and setting balances. In this example, we will be creating a paid time off policy for full-time employees.

Take a look at how this step looks from start to finish below

First, set the general settings this means setting which work days the policy applies to and the work hours per day. This can be done by selecting the days (represented in blue) and entering the hours. Below you can see I set ours to be Monday to Friday for 8 hours a day. If an employee were to request time off from Thursday to Sunday, it would not count Saturday and Sunday as work days, meaning the employee has taken 2 days off for a total of 16 working hours.

Next, decide if the time-off requests require admins' approval and determine the minimum time in advance users may request a time off. Finally set the carryover limit - or how many hours or days they can transfer to the next year. In the example below you can see I set the policy to require admin approval and the limit for requesting an absence to be 14 days in advance. I also set the carryover limit to 56 hours.

Simply select relevant users from the list or use the filter to quickly find and select users who meet your desired criteria. When ready press the next step.

Each employee has a different remaining time-off balance, some may have taken time off already and some may have carried over days from the previous year. This is why when creating a policy we also need to set the individual balance of each user. It is from this balance that each time-off request will be deducted. This step is a bit more tedious than others, but you should only need to do it once. We recommend you come prepared with a list of your employees' current balances!

To set the balance simply add the number of remaining time off each user has next to their profile. Press save and that's it.

Notice in the example below each of my employees has a different balance:

Congrats you have created a policy!

Now that you have gotten everything set up, let's go over the actions admins can take to manage time off in your company.

Once your employees request time off you may need to approve it. This can be done from the time-off dashboard on the desktop Simply navigate to the view request button and you'll be able to see all the requests awaiting approval. Here you can approve or decline them.

If you want to add time off for your employees, you can just go to the add time off button on the right side, and select the user, and the policy you want to add time off for. If you have more than 1-time clock set up in your account, you will need to select which time clock you want the time off to appear. Automatically you will see the user's remaining balance. Enter the days of time-off days you are requesting.

After you select the days of time-off being added you can see the total time-off hours being deducted and below it the employee's new balance. All this with absolutely no calculations needed! Lastly, add a manager's note if needed, and don't forget to press add time off at the bottom left to save the added time off.

💡 Tip: If you want to add a partial day time off, and not an all-day time off you can! Simply toggle off the all-day time-off option and add the time-off hours.

Once you've set up your time off and approved requests, you might be wondering where you can see approved time off. The approved time off can be seen in multiple places making it easy for you to keep track of who is off them. Let's go over all the options below.

The Time Off Lobby - Simply enter the time-off lobby, and right away you will be able to see all the users who made requests and their approved time-off. To view a breakdown of their remaining balance, hover over the total remaining balance. To view their individual requests, click on the line with their name and scroll down to see their past requests.

💡 Tip: If you want to get a breakdown of the approved time off per a policy and not by all users, simply select the drop-down and change the policy.

The Employee's User Profile - In the employee profile you can navigate to the time of time. Here you can see all the policies they are assigned to, their balances, and their request history.

As a mobile-first solution Connecteam, helps you manage your employees' time off whether you are in the office or on the go. From the admin tab just click on the time off feature. Here you can see who is on time off today, approve or decline any pending requests, view request history and add time off on behalf of your employees.

For your employees, time off could never be more simple. By accessing their profile on the mobile app they can view all the policies they are assigned to and their balance for each policy. By clicking on view request, they can also view their past time-off requests, and easily request time off. To help your employees learn more about how to request time off both from the mobile and the dashboard, you can share this article with them.

To edit an existing time-off policy, simply click on the three dots found next to the policy you want to edit. Press edit policy and that's it! Note that here you can also edit the policy assignment, meaning which employees are assigned to this policy, or delete the policy.

When looking at the time clock policies in your time clock lobby you can see the number of users who aren't assigned to a policy. This is displayed by a red person icon and a line through it and the number of employees not assigned to the policy written beside it.

Take a look at how this looks below:

There are two ways you can change a time-off balance:

Yes, navigate to the time-off feature and select the time-off relevant policy, select the user, and then in the actions button select add time-off. Set the relevant days, and additional time off. If you have more than the one-time clock, then you will be asked to select which time clock the time-off should appear for each user. Take a look at how this looks below:

If the user has not clocked in already and the date of the absence has not passed then absolutely! Simply select the policy and navigate to the user whose time off you want to edit. Click on the three dots next to their name and select view requests. The requests will appear to the right. Find the relevant approved request and select the three dots next to the approval button, then click reject. Take a look at how this looks below.

In this article, we went over Connecteam's Time off feature. We discussed why managing time off is important and how difficult it can be to do so accurately. We went over all the in and outs of using our time off feature including activating it, the dashboard, how to create policies, how to approve time off requests, how to view approved time off, and how to add time off on behalf of your employees. Finally, we went over some of our most frequently asked questions. Now you can rest assured knowing manual time off calculations are long behind you and everything is clear and transparent to both your managers and employees.

Have questions about Time Off? Check out our most frequently asked Time Clock questions here.

Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies to ANY question.