Frequently asked questions about time balances
"How do I add the employees' current balances to Smartplan?"
If you already keep track of your employees' current balances, you can add these to Smartplan. This ways you do not have to start over.
The employees current balances can be added as a compensation on each employee and this can be done in "Hours & Salary".
Make a look-up for a period and find the employee's time balance in the column "Balance" for each employee.
When you click on the employee's balance, you can add a compensation:
Compensations can have both a positive and negative value so not matter what the employee's current time balance is, you can add it to Smartplan. Read more about how you can counterbalance overtime with compensations.
"Can the time balances be used for shifts that have already been attended in Smartplan?"
Yes, the balances can be used for shifts that have already been attended. The time balances are based on the start date that has been set for the employee's first target. This means that if you want the time balance to be calculated from the beginning of the year, you simply add a target for the employee that starts on January 1st 2021.
The target can be added in "Settings" → "Smartplan Settings" → "Time balances". Here you can set up the target for each employee:
You can read more about how to set up the target here.
"One of my employees has the settings 'Attended hours minus target'. What happens if I make a look-up that contains hours that has not yet been attended?"
If you have chosen that attended hours should be used to calculate the employee's balance, it will be these that the balance is based on. However, you can end up in a situation where you make a look-up that contains hours that not yet has been attended. In these cases we will use the planned hours to calculate the balance.
This means that if you for example make a look-up on August 31st for the period August 1st - September 30th, it will be the attended hours that the balance is based on for the month of August. But for the month of September it will be the planned hours that the balance is calculated on. So the planned hours will only be used for shifts, that the employee has not yet attended.
"What start date should I choose for the time balances?
You can choose any start date you would like. What you have to keep in mind, is that the time balance for that given person will only be registered and calculated from that start date and onwards. And it only takes the registered data from Smartplan into account.
Therefore, it makes sense to choose the moment you started registering your employees' attendance in Smartplan as a start date for the calculations of the time balances.
An example: You started using Smartplan from the 1st of January, but only for planning your rotas to begin with. From the 1st of March you also began to register the attendance through Smartplan by using our punch clock. Therefore it would make sense to choose the March 1st as the start date, even if this would already be months ago. You can enter the time balances that the employees has had as of the 1st of March as a compensation to their overtime account in Smartplan (see 1st question in this article).
Furthermore, we recommend starting the timebalance on the first day of a period, as this will give you the best possible overview. This means that if your balances are calculated on a weekly basis, we recommend choosing a Monday as the start date, and if it is calculated on a monthly basis, we recommend choosing the 1st of a month. It is however, also possible to choose another day - in that case the system will of course calculate the correct balance for you.
"Can I have several targets at the same time"?
If the targets for your employees change from month to month, you can set up as many targets as you like.
For example, you can add a target with a start date on March 1st for 100 hours/month and then add another target with the start date of April 1st for 120 hours/month. As a consequence, the first target for 100h/month will only apply for the month of March. In April, it will be substituted automatically by your second target.
If you realize that one of your targets was set up in a wrong way, don't worry about it. You can adjust it as you like, whether it is about the start date, target hours or target period. All your data is still stored inside Smartplan.