Adding a Holiday Request as a Staff Member

Requesting Holiday as a Staff Member

Requesting a holiday as a staff member is a simple process. You can request a holiday for a day, longer than a day or just several hours. Once you have submitted a holiday request, you must have the request approved by a manager.

Step 1

To make a holiday request, first go to My Account > My Availability >  Request Holiday. The screen will ask for broad information about the request: is it less than a day, a single day or a longer period. To implement this, you just need to go to your availability and put in a new holiday request.

When requesting to take part of a day off, you can specify whether you will be leaving in the morning or the afternoon and what time you will be returning. This adjustment will make absences much easier to keep track of, ensuring the smooth running of your business regardless of absence.

The process will consider the staff member’s specific contract configuration and offer relevant options. For example, a staff member who is only allowed to book half or whole days will have options limited to those choices. Additionally, if a staff member has an Earn & Claim holiday allowance, you can choose how much time you want to take off down to the hour. This allows the system to then offer further options specific to the dates requested so that part-day and half-day requests are much easier to enter.
When requesting to take part of a day off, you can specify whether this will be the morning or the afternoon. This adjustment will make absences much easier to keep track of, ensuring the smooth running of your business regardless of absence.

This screen will also show you your total holiday allowance in the right-hand corner and how much time off you have left.

Step 2

Once you have specified the period of time you are going to be away from work, you can also include a reason for absence for your manager to see. Once the details of your absence have been decided, you can go on to review your request.

Step 3 

Finally, you will have the chance to review your request. Here, you can double-check that you have booked off the correct days and that you are ensuring your planned absence is within the limits of your available holiday.

Once your request is confirmed, you can also see how much holiday you will have left over. To finalise your request, click Confirm holiday request. The request will then be saved and can be viewed under My Account > My Availability > My Holiday Requests. It will have an orange pending approval button until a manager approves your time off request. Then, it will change to a green approved button if a manager approves the request.

Optional steps

Now that you know how to add a holiday request, there are a few additional options that can be helpful if you want to create more specific holiday requests or to cancel holiday which we will go through now.

Requesting Partial Days

You are also able to request to take only part of a day off rather than the whole day or a single day. The screen will ask: Is it less than a day, a single day, or a longer period? To implement this, you just need to go to your availability and put in a new holiday request.

Another feature is that you can specify whether you are going to be leaving in the morning or the afternoon. This adjustment will make absences that much easier to keep track of, ensuring the smooth running of your business regardless of absence.

If a staff member has an Earn & Claim holiday allowance, you can choose how much time they will take off down to the hour.

To help with pay calculations, the system will now be able to ignore expected breaks. This means that the system will not consider expected breaks that might happen once the team member has left for the day. You can choose whether to calculate their breaks or simply deduct the exact hours requested.

Cancelling a Holiday Request

You can easily cancel a holiday request by going to holiday requests and clicking cancellation request. However, it must be approved first.

By default, most companies will need you to cancel your request before it starts. However, you are also able to cancel holiday requests retrospectively. This option is useful if you want to allow staff to cancel a holiday that has already started. By default, they cannot request cancellations for past holidays. However, you will need to set this up by going to the Staff & Contracts tab of Global Settings. Change  Allow retrospective holiday cancellation requests to Yes.

Requesting Partial Days

You are also able to clearly and succinctly request to take only part of a day off rather than the whole day or a single day. The screen will now ask for broad information about the request: Is it less than a day, a single day, or a longer period? To implement this, you just need to go to your availability and put in a new holiday request.

This allows the system to offer further options specific to the requested dates, making part-day and half-day requests much easier to enter.

Another updated feature is that when requesting to take part of a day off, you can specify whether this will be the morning or the afternoon. This adjustment will make absences that much easier to keep track of, ensuring the smooth running of your business regardless of absence.

If a staff member has an Earn & Claim holiday allowance, you can choose how much time they will take off down to the hour.
To help with pay calculations, the system will now be able to ignore expected breaks. This means that the system will not consider expected breaks that might happen once the team member has left for the day.
You can choose whether to calculate their breaks or simply deduct the exact hours requested.