Track your team's time off, using M365

Employees can submit the time-off requests themselves. All they need is to select the types of their leave e.g. vacation, sick, unpaid, the dates, the person who will review their requests, and enter the details for the requests. After submitting the request, they can see from the first page of the User’s interface both their requests that were reviewed or are still pending. They can also filter their requests by status, e.g. ‘Pending’, ‘Approved’, ‘Pending Cancellation’, and ‘Cancelled’. To be able to submit time-off requests via the app saves time for much manual communication e.g. emails and paperwork with supervisors and HR!

• Apart from the employees, the managers or the admin can also create leave requests for the employees. In both Manager’s and Admin’s interfaces, enter the information mentioned above and select which employee the request is for in ‘Create Request For Employee’. Then the request is done! This is useful, for example, when a team member is sick too sick to turn on the computer to create a request, the manager can do so for that person.

In the User’s interface, users can learn about each type of leave and what information they should provide when they make a specific type of leave request. All the information can be accessed through ‘About’. This is to save time from back-and-forth communication between the users and the approvers about getting sufficient information to process a request.

On the Manager’s interface of this app, managers have access to a comprehensive overview of all leave requests. These requests are displayed on the main page, and managers can conveniently filter them based on their status, such as ‘Pending,’ ‘Approved,’ ‘Declined,’ ‘Pending Cancellation,’ and ‘Cancelled.’ By selecting the pending requests, managers can review the request details and make decisions to either approve or decline them.

• To delegate decision-making authority to another person, the Manager’s interface provides an option called ‘Set Available Status.’ This feature allows managers to temporarily designate someone else to handle the decision-making process. For instance, if a department manager is on leave, the manager’s status can be set as ‘unavailable,’ and permission can be delegated to the assistant manager for that duration. This ensures that the requests can still be processed smoothly even in the absence of the regular person in charge.

Employees can check their leave balances while managers can see and edit their employees’ time-off balances via this app. Employees can see how many days of vacation leave they have and how many days of different kinds of leave they took, e.g. ‘Vacation’, ‘Standard Sick’, and ‘Unpaid Day’, in ‘My Leave Balance’ in the User’s interface. This feature allows employees to track the records of their leave balances and plan their time-off accordingly.

Managers can see all the above information about their employees. Moreover, they can edit the leave balances of their employees by selecting the option they want to edit, e.g. Standard Sick Entitlement, then enter the new number of entitlement. The leave balances of that employee are updated! This can be done in ‘Edit Employee Information’ in the Manager’s interface. This feature enables flexibility in the leave accruals. For example, if leave is used as an incentive for outstanding performance, the manager can directly add that to the employee’s balances once the target is achieved without the need to communicate with HR and go through complex paperwork.

In both User’s and Manager’s interfaces, the users or managers can see who is on leave and when it takes place via ‘Calendar’. The users and managers can select to see the approved leave requests of all employees or only a specific department by selecting the options of the drop-down menu on the right of the page. With this feature, the managers and employees can plan their leaves accordingly so as not to disturb the daily operation of the teams.

In the User’s interface, click ‘Company Holidays’, and the users can see what paid holidays the company is providing in that year. Hence, they can arrange their leave accordingly.