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Using ‘Shifts’ for Time Off – Called Off

Some users prefer to create “shifts” for time off instead of using the Time Off section. This may be useful for a number of reasons:

  • It allows employees to see Time Off for other employees right on their Everyone’s Schedule view (but only on published weeks)

  • It allows you to create designated types of time off that can be tracked later (ex. Paid Time Off, Vacation, Sick Day, etc.) using the REPORTS section. Designations can be made using Positions or Categories (using categories could allow you to prevent employees from seeing the reason for other’s Time Off on the schedule)

  • It allows you to create shifts for Pending Time Off if you want those to appear on the schedules also (you can set the paid hours on those shifts to be zero) 

  • It allows you to enter “paid hours” for time off so that the total paid hours for the week will include the paid Time Off hours

  • It allows you to quickly see on all schedule views how many Time Offs (and pending Time Offs) you have each day 

Note: Handling Time Off as shifts, you can still allow employees to submit requests using the time off system, or you can turn that off on the SETTINGS> Global Employee Permissions page and have the employees send a message with a request instead.

Drawback of this approach might include that employees could only see future Time Off shifts on weeks that are published and employees can see any shift description you might add to that time off (you would need to avoid adding any private information there). 

add notes that are not visible to all employees when someone is out sick or other reasons we are deleting a shift. Is there a place where we can put manager notes? We would like to better track the reasons we delete shifts or swap them, without visibility for all employees, so we can maintain confidentiality for our employees and help when working through payroll  tracking sick