Holiday and leave management is a critical aspect of any project—big or small. While it may seem easy like an easy task, efficiency is essential, as a minor mistake can cause a resource crunch or payroll processing errors.
Using a leave management tool can help automate this process and eliminate errors. It helps project managers and their teams keep track of holiday allowance usage.
If you’re already using Mission Control to track time, we recommend you look at using our Holiday Allowance Tracking feature for PTO leave and holiday management. In doing so, you’ll have everyone’s data in one place, making tracking work time and time off easy.
The feature helps you manage your team’s schedules and ensure that your projects always have the resources they need from start to finish.
What is the Holiday Allowance Tracking feature in Mission Control?
The Holiday Allowance Tracking feature in Mission Control allows project managers to define how many PTO days are allocated to each team member over a particular period. The feature allows the project manager to separate and manage the different types of time off, such as vacation time, personal leave, maternity leave, sick off, and sabbatical.
For paid time off (PTO), where the team members receive holiday allowances, the PM can easily add the holiday allowance received. This ensures that the managers account for holiday allowances in the project budget.
- Each project team member can have multiple holiday allowances, such as 20 vacation days, seven sick-off days, etc. You can define each holiday allowance for a period of time and for a specific type of holiday.
- Once the holiday period is over, each holiday allowance record will rollover or expire. When the holiday allowance rolls over, you can specify what percentage will be rolled over. For example, if employees have 20 holiday days per year, you can set the system to rollover 25%.
- Automating the entire holiday tracking process reduces the number of repetitive tasks employees must perform, leaving them with more time for billable tasks.
Key components of the Holiday Allowance Tracking feature
Mission Control’s Holiday Allowance Tracking feature has a couple of key components that you can take advantage of.
Holiday Trigger
The holiday trigger feature automatically updates the Holiday Allowance record based on the following scenarios:
- When a holiday is set to ‘approved,’ the feature increases the days used by the value of the days taken.
- When a holiday is set to ‘approved’ but the holiday record is deleted, the Holiday Allowance ‘Used’ field will be reduced by the Holiday’ Days Taken’ field value.
- When a holiday is set to ‘approved’ and the Holiday’ Days Taken’ is changed, the Holiday Allowance ‘Used’ field will be adjusted by the difference between the Holiday’ Days Taken’ prior value and the new value.
Validation Rules
There are two Validation Rules in the Holiday Allowance feature:
- There’s a Validation Rule ensures that the remaining value on the holiday allowance is more than the number of days taken on the holiday record.
- The other Validation Rule ensures there’s always a holiday allowance record specified on the holiday record if the ‘Type’ field is set to annual, sick, or study leave.
Holiday Allowance Reports
You can generate two reports using the Holiday Allowance Tracking feature. The first report is one detailing the current number of holiday days used. The other report shows the remaining holiday days for each employee. This is great for individual team members to be able to quickly view the remaining days they have within their allowance.
Holiday Allowance Remaining Summary
This component gives you a summary of all holiday allowances given to employees. The holiday allowance is grouped by Role and Type.
Holiday Allowance Remaining Role
The holiday allowance remaining role component summarizes the number of days remaining for each holiday ‘Type’ for a particular employee. This summary gives you a real-time view of that specific employee’s holidays as they accrue or expire.
Conclusion
Managing the different types of time off for each one of your project team members can be challenging. And without a proper way of tracking when employees take (or don’t take) their time off, you may not know how many vacation days a year your employees are taking and how much that is affecting your projects.
The Holiday Allowance Tracking feature in Mission Control eases the leave request and holiday management process. It gives you a single source of truth about who is taking time off and when. This eliminates any possible confusion and overlapping leave and sick day requests.
This feature also lets teams view their holiday allowance and plan in advance. Each team member can view the status of their annual leave requests in real-time. When teams can see the holiday plans of their fellow team members, they can plan their tasks accordingly (and step in where necessary) to ensure the project keeps running smoothly.
Contact us today to learn more about Mission Control’s Scheduler and how it can streamline your resource management process.
