The holiday account
The holiday account is an optional feature, which tracks the number of absence days for an absence type of your choice. It will also help you to not exceed a certain predefined limit of absence days.
Even though the holiday account in theory was created to monitor the holiday allowance of your employees, it is designed in such a flexible way that you can track literally any absence type of your liking.
Please be aware that only whole absence days are being tracked. Hourly absences are not considered in the balance.
Setup of the holiday account
In order to activate the holiday account for your Smartplan account, go to Settings → Smartplan Settings → Absence and tick off the according checkbox.
Settings
Next, take a look at the available settings:
The period during which the absence days will get tracked is the holiday year. This year doesn't necessarily have to last from Jan 1st - Dec 31st. You can freely choose any start date for the holiday year, and it will then run for 12 months beginning from that chosen date.
As mentioned above, you can choose what absence type should be tracked by the holiday account. It could be the account's default absence type "Holiday" or it could be one of your custom absence types, for example if you want to distinguish between paid and unpaid leave.
The following two settings are about legal holidays and weekends. As these often are days, where employees are not supposed to work anyway, the question is whether these should be counted as holidays and thus flow into the holiday account as well. If for example you set the holiday account up to not include Sundays, and you create a week of "Holiday" absence for a person, only 6 days will be added to that persons holiday balance.
Finally, you have a setting regarding visibility. Usually, the employees would be able to see their holiday account in their personal profiles or while creating absence requests. However, if the holiday account is purely meant to improve your own overview on your employees holidays, you can choose that the holiday balance should not be visible to your employees at all.
Holiday limits
All the way down of the "Absence" settings page, you will have the opportunity to specify holiday limits for each of your employees.
Simply click on "Specify limit", enter the limit that was agreed upon and "Save" the changes.
As soon as any absence with the according absence type of the holiday account is being approved, it will automatically be updated in this table. Approved absences that lie in the past will be shown in the column "Held holiday", while any approved absences planned for a future date will appear under "Future holiday".
Should you choose not to enter any limit for a given person, his or her holiday balance will simply show a "0".
Use cases of the holiday account
The holiday account is present in several places of the system. The holiday balance for each employee is always the sum of his or her approved past and future absences.
If you want to check how many days of holidays a certain person has already taken OR planned within this holiday year, you should take a look at the table at the end of the "Absence" settings page. Here you will get the most detailled overview (see previous chapter).
If you want to quickly get an overview of all your employees' holidays without having to enter the settings, go to the menu item "Employees". The detailed view of the employee list shows you all the employees' holiday accounts at one glance:
As an example, if your employees are supposed to give in their holidays for each year latest until the end of January, you could check the employee list mid-January and quickly see who is missing to hand in their holiday still.
Of course, the holiday account is present in the individual user profiles as well. You will find it in the "Absence" tab:
The holiday account does not actually state, how many days of holidays your employees have left for the year. But that doesn't mean you will have to calculate that every time before creating an absence for an employee or approving an employee's absence request. During absence creation, Smartplan automatically updates the holiday balance depending on the time period you are choosing. Should you exceed the holiday limit, it will be highlighted in red.
In this video you can see how it looks.
This feature is present during your employees' absence creation as well. While they are choosing the dates of their absence period, the holiday balance will automatically update itself. This is only possible, if you have given the employees access to their individual holiday accounts through the settings, of course.