Vacation Time for New and Existing Employees

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This post is as much about announcing a neat new feature, as it is about helping out with two work-flows that may seem unfamiliar to some users. To set the stage, in order to generate the reports our users want to use, we help them not just the current vacation days for their staff, but also historic data as well. Technically speaking, every time someone earns or uses vacation time we store a transaction in our database. If you ever get stuck, you can always edit this transaction ledger directly - but we'll get to that later. First off, let's begin with the setup.

Setting Up Vacation & Sick Time Tracking

The first thing that you should do, as an administrator, is make sure you set up all of the appropriate types of time off for your organization. We've added "Vacation" and "Sick" time for you, but some people will also track "Personal" or "Training" time as well. To change your time off options:

1. Click on the "Setup" from the menu, which will open up your Setup => Customizations area
2. Click on "Types of Time Off" from the customization options on the right
3. Edit, Add, or Delete types from this list

Note: On the Tribe dashboard, users see the number of vacation days they have left; you can change which type of time off is shown on the home page from the Setup => Customize page, under "Vacation and Sick Days".

Adding Vacation Time for Existing Employees

The best place to change how much vacation time an employee has every year is from their details page. To get there, click on "People" from the menu, then click on the employee's name. From that page, click on "Edit User's Time Off" just below their profile picture. This will pull up the list of vacation and sick allotments they get every year. If you click on the allotment, you can change how much they get in a year and how much they can carry-over at year's end.

If you'd like to change the amount of vacation or sick time that an employee has on their account (e.g. they forgot to record some vacation time or you're giving them a one-time bonus) then the best place to that is the Time Off Ledger ("Setup" => "Time Off Ledger").

Editing the Time Off Ledger is a lot like a bookkeeping process. Each time someone earns new vacation, a Credit is added to their account. Each time someone uses (or loses) vacation time, a Debit is taken from their account. The same applies to any other types of time off that you track (e.g. Sick or Personal time).

To add a transaction, click the "Record a New Transaction" button at the bottom of the page. Choose which type of time off, the user, and how much to adjust their account by. Clicking "Submit" will immediately apply the transaction to their account. Don't worry - you can always come back later to edit the transaction.

Note: It's quite common to find that you have to add a transaction to each person's account when you first start tracking time off using Tribe. This is generally part of the setup period, and doesn't need to be done any more beyond the initial configuration.

Adding Vacation Time for New Employees

Previously, setting up Vacation Time for a new employee was just like doing it for an existing employee: you'd first add the employee, then record a transaction. However, today we released a new tool to help you do it as part of the employee setup process.

Generally, it's still best to configure your default settings first, (see Setting Up Vacation & Sick Time Tracking above) but after that you can rely on the "Add a new employee" screen to and avoid the Ledger going forward. To add a new employee, click on "People" from the menu, then "Add new employee". On this page, under "Compensation", you'll see a new link: "Set Employees Vacation/Sick Time". Clicking this link will reveal the fields necessary to specify the annual allotment of and the carry-over for each type. It also provides a field for the existing balance for the employee. Depending on whether you enter a positive or negative number, it will add a credit or debit accordingly.

For example, if all of your employees get 2 weeks vacation a year (typical 5-day work week) and can carry over 1 week per year, you'll want to enter "10.0" under "Annual Vacation Days" and "5.0" under "Max Carry Over". If the employee you're adding has already earned 5 days of their time (let's imagine it's 1/2 way through the year) and they've already taken 4 days vacation, then their Current Balance is "1.0".

Again, don't worry - you can always dip into the Time Off Ledger to make changes to their account.

Note: Time Off accrual happens on the first of each month. When you're calculating the current balance, be sure to remember that your employees will have already earned part of their annual allotment.

So there you have it - managing and setting Vacation Time for new and existing employees. If you have any questions about the above steps, please post a comment here, or on our Get Satisfaction User Community.