Effective leave management is core to better control over business resources. However, it’s only a part of the equation — to achieve success, you have to check how your employees dispose of all their time, including working hours and days off.
The question is: how to manage your team’s time well and ensure high business productivity in the meanwhile? For this to happen, you might need to apply more than one software solution — and that’s where actiPLANS integrations come in handy:
- Our absence management software can be synced with actiTIME — a multifunctional time tracker for easy progress monitoring and in-depth performance analysis.
- Besides, actiPLANS uses iCal to sync your corporate schedules with third-party apps, which allows you to supervise employees’ time off right in Google Calendar or any other web-based calendar that supports the iCal format.
Read this article to explore the benefits of these actiPLANS integrations, learn what makes them remarkable and understand how to set them up in a few simple steps.
What Is actiTIME?
actiTIME is a user-friendly timesheet solution with plenty of useful features for business management. It lets you:
- Track time for tasks in the browser or the mobile app
- Oversee team workloads and monitor project progress in real time
- Keep a record of billable hours and staff-related costs
- Generate accurate invoices in merely a few clicks
- Control overtime and get error-free data for payroll purposes
- Analyze business performance via insightful reports and charts
In sum, while actiPLANS helps you keep tabs on employees’ absences, actiTIME is perfect for handling everything they do during their working hours. Together, these software tools give you much better control over business resources and let you see how your workers utilize their time throughout the employment period.
actiTIME Integration Benefits
- Better analysis — actiTIME provides a wealth of insightful data: time-track for tasks, overtime statistics, billable hours, met or unmet estimates, etc. In combination with time off stats from actiPLANS, it creates a complete picture of the use of time by your employees. Refer to it to enhance the analysis of team productivity and workforce capacity in your business.
- Trouble-free decision-making — During the integration, your time off data travels from one software to another seamlessly and infallibly, which lets you access highly accurate information without switching between the accounts and simplify decision-making a great deal.
- Process efficiency — When actiPLANS and actiTIME are synced, you can toggle between them with a single mouse click and save a lot of time by doing away with manual data entry. And as your process efficiency increases, you are bound to lower business costs and attain higher productivity too.
How to integrate actiPLANS with actiTIME
It doesn’t take much time or effort to activate this handy integration and start enjoying all the benefits it provides:
- Make sure you have accounts in both solutions (and if you don’t, click here to sign up for a free actiTIME trial)
- Open the integration settings and hit Integration with actiTIME / actiPLANS
- Align system setting between the accounts (visit this page to find out how to do that)
- Proceed to track employees’ time off — the data will be synced between the apps, and you will be able to access it via any account that suits your needs best at any moment.
What Is iCal?
iCal is an open standard digital file format that stores such calendar-based info as holidays and events. It allows for an easy and 100% streamlined exchange of data between different apps via the so-called iCal feeds — computer files and URLs used to export and import information.
It’s possible to sync actiPLANS with any online calendar that supports the iCal format. More precisely, you can:
- Export your corporate schedule to a web-based calendar of choice
- Add extra public holidays to your corporate schedule by importing them to actiPLANS through an iCal file found on the internet
- Export your team’s time off data to a web calendar of choice and then keep tabs on the updates in employee schedules directly from that calendar
- Share the created iCal feeds with other actiPLANS users to let them access your team’s time off data via their own online calendars
iCal Integration Benefits
- Greater visibility — iCal allows for seeing your team’s time off data right in your favorite online calendar (there’s no need to open your actiPLANS account for that at all). Besides, all the changes in employees’ absence schedules — their new leave requests and approved days off — get automatically reflected in the synced calendar too, making it effortless to stay up to date with employees’ vacation plans.
- Flexible configuration — Different iCal feeds can carry different types of information. For instance, you may easily configure them to capture changes in the schedules of specific employees or track particular leave types. Plus, you can choose whom to share your iCal feeds with, granting data access only to authorized teams and professionals.
For more information on how to create iCal feeds and configure them, please check out our User Guide.
In Conclusion
The integration with actiTIME and online calendars is just one of many reasons to start using actiPLANS. Besides them, our absence tracker offers:
- Insightful time off reports and charts
- Built-in automation for trouble-free PTO and leave management
- Employee self-service system for easy vacation scheduling
- A user-friendly mobile app and much more
Start your free 30-day trial now to check them all out in practice!
