How to counterbalance overtime in Smartplan
In Smartplan you can activate the feature "Time balances", if you want to keep track of how much your employees are working compared to what has been agreed. In the feature, we call this the employee's target.
If you have not already activated the feature on your Smartplan account you can read more about how to do it. The feature is available for all Smartplan customers - it does not require a Plus package.
After having activated the feature, you will get an overview of the balance your employees have.
If an employee for example has to counterbalance overtime, this can be done in two ways:
Counterbalance overtime with absence
We recommend using absence in Smartplan to counterbalance overtime. This way, it will become more clear why an employee is absent and the employees can also create the absence themselves so that you only have to approve it.
When an employee wants to counterbalance overtime, they can create absence from their own profile. You can create different types of absence that the employee can choose from when creating absence. As standard, we have added "Sickness" and "Vacation".
In this article you can see, how an employee can create absence: How to request vacation.
You can choose to create an absence type called "Lieu day", which they can use to counterbalance overtime instead of "Vacation" or "Sickness".
When you have to approve the absence, you should choose that the hours should not count. Then the balance will be reduced. So simply choose that the shifts should give 0 hours and then the time balance will be affected correctly.
If you want an explanation for why the time balance is correctly affected, I will just try to give you an example of a calculation:
Here is an example for the month of June. The target for this month is 154 hours. This means that the goal for the employee is to work 154 hours this month. In this example, the employee's prior balance is 10.
As you can see, the red square indicates that the employee counterbalances overtime on June 5th. This means that the employee cannot achieve the target for this month. The employee works 147 hours instead of 154.
This is just an example, and the target might as well be 160,3 or something else.
So in the example, the employee's balance for the month is -7, and the employee "owes" 7 hours on the balance. These 7 hours are therefore subtracted from the employee's prior balance of 10 hours.
Correct an employee's balance with a compensation
You can also correct an employee's balance by creating a compensation on the balance. There might be different reasons to do this. Perhaps you want to add a balance from before you started using Smartplan and perhaps to you have to pay wages for overtime hours and therefore, you have to correct the balance.
Under "Hours & Salary" you have the column with the balance:
When you click on an employee's balance, you will get an overview with calculations. Louise has been working a lot more than her target the last three weeks and therefore her timebalance is +45,50 now.
Click "Add compensation" and fill out a data, description and the number of hours the balance should be corrected with. If you want to subtract from the balance, you simply add a minus, for example -4. If you want to add to the balance you simply write a positive number of hours. Click save.
Now you can see that the compensation becomes a part of the employee's balance. In this case, I have subtracted 30 hours for Louise since she has been paid for 30 hours of overtime.
