How to configure absence types and holiday plans

What is it for?

It defines how the company's absences are requested and approved: the absence types, the plan that grows the holiday balance, the days on which nobody may be absent and the rules the system applies by itself.

When to use it?

• You want to create an absence type that does not exist yet, or change who approves it.
• You want to prevent holidays in a critical week (mandatory days).
• You want to know why the employee cannot request a type (no balance allocated).

Where to find it?

People › Time off and attendance setup, with Time Types, Accrual plans, Mandatory days and Automatic Rules. This menu only exists for the Administrator: the HR manager does not see it.

Before you start

• Your profile is Administrator (the profile that, in this installation, has the Time off and attendance setup).
• The legal types come already created (59 in the demonstration, such as Annual holidays, Death of spouse, child or stepchild (20 days) or Assistência a filho). Before creating one, check whether it already exists.

How to use it

1. Open People › Time off and attendance setup › Time Types. The list has Name, Code and Description.
2. Open the type, for example Annual holidays. At the top, choose Kind (Working Time or Absence), the Unit (Hours or Days) and the Take Time Off in unit (Full day, Half day or Hours).
3. On the Absence tab, under Approval, choose who approves: None, By Time Off Officer, By Employee's Approver or By Employee's Approver and Time Off Officer. The demonstration's Annual holidays use the last one.
4. Under Allocation, Requires allocation means the employee can only request it if they have a balance. Allow Employee Requests says whether the employee can request new days for themselves (the New Request button in Request time off). On Annual holidays it is unticked, and the employee can still request the holidays they have.
5. Under Setup, choose Count days as Working days or Calendar days, and tick, as appropriate, Allow negative balance?, Ignore public holidays?, Hide on dashboard?, Supporting document expected? or Eligible for accrual rate?.
6. Click the save icon.

Expected result

The type now behaves as you defined in the request and the approval: the decision on the request follows what you chose in Approval, and a type that requires a document shows the alert “A document justifying this type of absence must be attached.” when saving a request without proof (seen on a request of type Authorised or approved by the employer).

The rest of the menu

• Accrual plans: the list opens empty, with “Create an accrual plan” and the columns Name, Levels and Employees.
• Mandatory days: the list opens empty (“No mandatory days yet!”), with the columns Name, Company, Start Date, End Date and Colour. To create one, click New, write the Name and the dates on the new line and save. An absence request on one of those days is not saved: “Validation Error You cannot request time off on a mandatory day.”
• Automatic Rules: it comes with one rule, “Employee schedule rule”, which in the demonstration has 9 employees.
• Kiosk onboarding: the menu also has this submenu, which does not yet have its own article in this documentation.
• Company Holidays and Attendance settings have their own articles: How to configure public holidays and How to record attendances.

Pending on-screen validation: creating an accrual plan and an automatic rule was not walked through; the text above only describes what the lists show.

Important notes

• Changing the type does not change requests already approved. An approved request is not reopened: use the article Record an absence to correct it.
• The request's default type. On the employee's request, the Time Type currently comes filled in with Training, which does not count as holidays; if you clear it, it goes back to Training.
• The fields that touch the law (point of art. 249.º, pay, maximum duration) are not edited here: they are in Payroll › Configure › Company › Absence types, under the responsibility of the national legal data.

Common problems

The employee does not see the absence type on the request

If Requires allocation is ticked, the employee needs an allocated balance of that type. See The holiday request does not have the type, the dates or the contract.