Adding Leave (TOIL/Flexi/Comp Time)
We now have a new feature which lets your employees request that leave be ADDED back onto their leave balances, as well as request normal leave taken.
This process of adding leave back is normally called TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) or else Flexi-Time or sometimes Comp Time, based on your region and organizational requirements. The good news is that we allow you to customize the name of this leave type to suit your needs. To change the label of leave that gets added back, you can go to Time Off & Leave -> Configure -> Leave Settings.
Here you can change this label name that will appear on all menus and screens within HR Partner. Please note that there is a 12 character limit on the name you can give here.
Which Leave Policies?
You can tailor specific leave policies that can have leave added back to them. For example, you might only want to let employees add back leave to their Annual Leave policy, and not to their Sick Leave or Personal Leave policies.
You can do this by going to Time Off & Leave -> Configure -> Leave Policies and clicking 'Edit' next to the leave policies to make this change.
You can either opt to make an existing leave policy able to have leave added back, or set up a completely new leave policy to handle your TOIL/FLexi/Comp type leave - it is entirely up to you how you wish to administer this.
Once you have set up the leave policy(ies) that can have time added back, then your employees can request hours or days to be added back to their balance against this policy on their ESS portal.
NOTE: You cannot nominate a leave policy that has been imported from an external payroll integration to be capable of TOIL/Flexi at this point in time - this is a limitation of the external vendors who often do not allow leave balances to be manipulated from an external source.
Employees Requesting Time To Be Added
Your employees can go to their ESS portal, where they will see a new option under their Time Off & Leave menu.
By going into this area, they can submit a form to ask for more leave to be added to their balances, and they can also see a history of past TOIL/Flexi/Comp time requests and their statuses.
When an employee is adding a request for time to be added, their request screen looks slightly different to a normal leave request screen where they are asking for time off. We've tinted the screen yellow for an instant visual reference, plus the screen is much simpler, asking only for the date that they may have worked the extra time, and the number of day/hours that they are asking to be added back to their balance.
Please also note that they can only ask for time to be added back to leave policies where you have allowed time to be added to.
Employees can also upload any supporting documentation against their request (e.g. overtime timesheets or letters from their supervisor).
Approval Process
Any request to have time added back will follow the exact same approval process as a normal time-off request. This means that if you have any enhanced approval rules set up in your company, then the request will follow those same rules for the approval process. Otherwise, employees will be able to nominate the admin user they wish to send their request for extra time to.
At this stage, it is not possible to have a different approval process for TOIL/Flexi/Comp requests as opposed to normal time-off requests.
Approving of TOIL/Flexi requests is done exactly the same way as approving a normal leave entry. Once again, TOIL/Flexi request approval screens will be yellow tinted to indicate that the time is being added back rather than taken off.
Admins Manually Adding Time
Admin users in the system can also manually add time to their employees balances without going through the whole approval process via the ESS portal. (Though we highly recommend that the full approval process is followed for better auditing).
To manually add a balance transaction to an employee, you can click on their name from the employee list (or use the search bar at the top of the screen to find them), then (1) go to the ' Absence/Leave' module.
Any time added back to the employee's balance will be shown (2) in blue text to differentiate them from normal time off entries. To add another transaction to increase the employee's balance, you can (3) click the small down arrow to the right of the ' Add Absence' button to drop down a menu.
So now you can use the normal ' Add Absence' button to add a time away entry like you did before (which will reduce the employees balance), or else use the new drop down to add an entry that will increase their leave balance.
The screen for adding a balance is also a bit simpler than the normal screen for reducing their balance.
You basically have to enter in the leave policy (once again, you can only select from the policies that allow leave to be added back), and the date and number of days/hours that you will be adding.
You can also upload any supporting documentation as file attachments here, and set reminders for this entry like you do with any other submodule entry in HR Partner.
NOTE: Any leave transactions that are adding back to an employee's leave balance are NOT shown on the company or ESS calendars, nor are they included in the iCal feed to external calendars at this stage.
Filtering Reports To See Taken/Added Time
We have added new filtering options in the Absence/Leave report to allow you to either show ALL transactions on the report (including time taken and time added), or else you can set this filter drop down to just show time taken, time added or everything.