Setting Up Working Day Templates
This article describes how we calculate the amount of time off that your employees will take when they request vacation or holiday time in the system. You may have some employees that work a standard Monday to Friday work week, and you may have some that only work a reduced number of days per week. You may even have employees that have different working hours for different days of the week.
The good news is that HR Partner can handle almost all these scenarios. The way we do that is to let you specify the Working Day Templates that your employees will be working under.
You must set up at least one working day template, but you can set up as many as you will need to cover all working conditions for your staff.
To set up the templates, you can go to Time Off & Leave > Configure > Work Days
This will show you the current templates that you have set up.
Setting Up A Template
The simplest working day template (and this is the default template we initially give you when you create your company) is the standard Monday to Friday working week, with weekends off.
Remember: Every employee will have to be allocated to a working day template, so you need to have at least one template defined in your company.
Here are the fields that you can change when setting up a template:
| Field | Description |
| Name | This is a descriptive name that you can give your template. Use something that will make it easy for you to understand what it is when allocating an employee to it later, e.g. ' Part Timers', or 'Tuesday to Saturday' etc. |
| Working Hours Per Day | This is where you will specify whether your employees work the same number of hours on each day, or whether they will have different working hours for each day of the week. |
| Hours Per Day | If you selected ' Fixed' for the previous field, then you can specify the number of hours the employee works on each day you choose below. |
| Nominate Working Days | Here is where you choose which days of the week the employee will be working. If you specified variable working hours above, you will also be asked for the number of hours on each day that the employee will work. Place a checkmark next to the days that the employee will work, and uncheck the days that are not considered working days. |
| Holidays | You can opt as to whether public holidays in the system will be considered normal working days, or whether they will be deemed non-working days. Normally holidays are non-working days, but if you have staff who have to work on public holidays (e.g. retail or hospitality workers), then you need to tell the system to include public holidays as their working days for time off calculations. |
| Mass Update | You can choose to roll out this template to all employee who don't already have a working day template allocated to them when you save this entry. This is useful if you have imported a bunch of employees and don't want to go through one by one to allocate them to a standard working day template. |
Fixed vs Variable Working Hours
Normally, you would set up your Working Day Template as 'Fixed' hours, if your employees work the same number of hours on each day (e.g. 8 hours per day, Monday to Friday). However, sometimes you may have part time staff who work varying hours on different days of the week.
In these cases, you will have to specify their working hours for each of their working days.
Specifying A Template For An Employee
To allocate your employees to any of your templates, you will need to edit their record, then on the 'Employment Info' tab, you can specify the 'Work Day Template' that they will be using at the bottom of the page.
Changing Templates Later
In some cases, you may have a staff member who starts off as a part timer and works a limited number of days per week, then later gets promoted to a full time employee etc. That is fine, and all you will need to do is to change their working day template in their employee record as described above, and their future leave applications will be calculated using the new template.
Be aware though, if you edit any of their old leave transactions that were calculated using their original template, that the edits will be recalculated using the new template, which may result in different durations and return dates being calculated.
Why We Use Working Day Templates
These templates are used by our system when calculating the number of days off that your employees will have when they apply for leave between two dates (or for calculating their return date accurately when they specify their leave start date and number of days they need off). For more information on how we calculate time off, please see our article on here.