How to start using time balances
We will go through:
- What you can use time balances for
- How you set up the settings
- Individual employee settings
- How you can see the employees' time balances
This can time balances in Smartplan be used for
Time balances in Smartplan makes it possible for you to keep an eye on whether your employees work as much as you would like - either per week or per month.
With this feature, you can:
- Have some kind of flex account for each employee.
- See if your hourly paid employees receive the amount of hours they are hired to in their contracts.
- See if your full-time permanent employees counterbalance enough overtime.
- See if you prioritize your ressources well enough.
You can easily get started using time balances in Smartplan. Keep reading to find out how.
How to set up settings for time balances
When you want to start keeping track of your employees' time balances in Smartplan, you first have to set up a few things on your account.
Go to "Settings" → "Smartplan Settings" → "Time balances" to get started.
The first thing you have to do is to active the time balances:
Afterwards you can set up some general settings on your account. One thing, you can choose, is how the balance should be calculated and you have three different options:
- Planned hours minus target (the employee's target will be subtracted from the planned hours)
- Attended hours minus target (the employee's target will be subtracted from the attended hours)
- Attended hour minus planned hours (the employee's planned hours will be subtracted from the attended hours)
The target is the number of hours you would like you employees to work and we will go through how you can choose this later in this article.
But first you have to choose whether the employees should be able to see their own balances on their profiles or not.
These things will be general settings for the employees. But if some employees should have different settings, it is also possible to choose this.
Under the general settings, you can find the individual settings.
Individual employee settings
Here you can choose if time balances should not be used for certain employees. In that case, you simply remove the check mark next to their name:
In the columns "Calculation" and "Visibility" you can furthermore choose the same things as under the general settings. So this is where you can change it after certain employees should have a different set up. In the example above, you can see that I have chosen that Hans' time balance instead should be calculated with planned hours minus target.
It is also under the individual settings that you can set up the target for your employees. This can be done by clicking "Set up" in the column "Target".
Afterwards, you can choose three different things regarding the employee's target:
- The start date of the target
- Target hours (the number of hours the employee should work)
- Target period (whether the target should be calculated on a weekly or monthly basis)
How to see the employees' time balances
As soon as you have set up the target, you can keep track of the employee's time balance. This can be found in "Hours & Salary".
Make a look-up for a period and then you will be able to see the employees time balances in the new column "Balance":
When you click on the balance, you can also see how this has been calculated:
You can always adjust the employees' time balances if you would like to. It might be relevant if an employees has to counterbalance overtime. You can read more about this, in our guide: "How to counterbalance overtime in Smartplan".