Summer, the vacation season, is almost here. For project and team managers, it’s the time when special attention is required to keep track of available resources and distribute workload.
When many employees are out of the office, it’s essential to record all absences accurately to understand who is at the desk. Companies choose various software solutions to be used as a vacation calendar that helps check who is out of the office today or on any of the future dates.
Determine Your Requirements
Specific requirements to a vacation planner may differ: they can include just keeping track of team members’ absences, or calculation of resulting balances, or leave approval procedure. However, the most important requirement is the ability to review leave chart of the entire team, of specific departments, or personal leave calendar of an employee.
Traditional Tools: Pros and Cons
Many companies use such tools as Excel or Google Calendar to run their businesses, so often they track employees’ leave time in them too. There are many tips and tricks for configuring a spreadsheet or setting up a calendar to display the vacation schedule chart of a team, or even to configure a vacation approval process. However, these tools basically are not designed for tracking employees’ absences, so the suggested workarounds are not always a handy way to manage absences.
Special vacation calendar software is of more help than multi-purpose spreadsheet or calendar tools. It allows team managers to understand who is available for next dates, review the historical data on taken leaves and balance changes, and avoid excessive time expenses when managing leave requests.
A Simple Way To Track Absences
When choosing a vacation calendar tool, make sure it offers all options necessary for a smooth and simple absence management process. While showing all necessary details on the employees’ taken leaves and leave requests, the calendar should definitely have an uncluttered interface.
actiPLANS provides an easy way to review employees’ past, current and upcoming absences in a clear calendar view. A manager can view both team’s and individual users’ vacation calendar.
The calendar interfaces of this tool contain necessary data on the taken and requested leaves: request approval status, balance changes related to the requests, users’ absence notes, and comments to leave requests and notes.
This way, actiPLANS is a time-saver for HR, project and team managers, providing quick access to all leave data in teams’ and employees’ leave calendars and cutting down on time expenses for absence management in the company.
