Vacation & Time-Off Management

Jason@URMHC

Has anyone used smartsheet to manage time-off requests and/or vacation for a pool of staff (approx. 200)?

 

Sophia Yip

Ours is quite simple:

Employee submits a Smartsheet form that contains:

1) Department

2) Name

3) Vacation Days (you don't actually need this if you do =Networkdays(start date, end date)

4) Start Date

5) End Date

6) Notes

Then this goes into a sheet in grid form, and can be viewed as Calendar.  This calendar can be imported to Outlook.  You can color code the different department if you wish, to make sure you don't have too many people off in one department.

Andrée Starå

Hi Jason,

You can find a great template as a starting point in the Solution Center.

It's called: Template: Team Vacation Planner.

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant @ Get Done Consulting

aus404

I'm using that template for some simple team planning and it works great but I can't work out how to assign  a new employee/ category with a different colour. Is there a rule somewhere that assigns the fill colour of the calendar bar to match the employee name formatting?

Thanks

Nick

Andrée Starå

Hi Nick,

If it hasn't been updated since I looked at it, then there isn't any Conditional Formatting set up (used to change color and more automatically). In the template, it's changed manually by right-clicking on the Gantt bar.

It's possible to automate it thru the Conditional Formatting feature.

Would that work?

Hope that helps!

Have a fantastic day!

Best,

Andrée Starå

Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

Andrée Starå

More info: https://help.smartsheet.com/learning-track/get-started/conditional-formatting

aus404

Thanks Andrée,

I'll see if I can do it that way. I think the I'd need to tag each entry with the category entry so I have something to key to. Anyway I'll re post if I get it to work.

Nick

Andrée Starå

Excellent!

Happy to help!

Evan Fowler

Hello,

I am using the Team Vacation Planner as well. However, I can not get it to work so that when a Form is submitted that it updates the Team Planner.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Evan Fowler

Would you be able to explain a bit more the issue you're having? Is it possible that the rows submitted are appearing way down at the bottom of the sheet? If that's the case, delete out any of the rows in-between. Forms need entirely new/clean rows in order to submit entries. If a row previously had information that was cleaned out, instead of the entire row being deleted, it will skip down to the next, new row.

If this isn't the issue, then screen captures of your sheet would be ideal, but please block out any sensitive data.

Cheers!

Genevieve

Evan Fowler

Hey @Genevieve P

Here is a screen shot, all I did was use the Team Vacation Planner. Remove the sample names and add my staff names.

What you explained about sounds like what is happening. When I do a test it goes to the bottom rather then under the employees name.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Evan Fowler

Thank you for this information! What you're describing is expected behaviour for Form Submissions - forms will create new rows either at the very bottom of the sheet or at the very top, and these rows aren't automatically sorted under Parent rows. (You can learn more about this in our Help Center article on Forms, here.)

You will need to either manually move the new submissions up under the person's name, or you can SORT the sheet each time you open it to adjust where the rows appear, then manually make them indented as children.

As an alternative, our Product Team is currently working on an update to how our Reports are displayed/managed, and when this new release comes out you will have the ability to group information within a Report. I would suggest that after this update you may want to create a Report from this sheet instead, and then group the rows by the employee name. You can subscribe to our Release Notes page to be notified when this feature is released!

Cheers,

Genevieve

Evan Fowler

Hey @Genevieve P

Do you have a direct email or teams chat account where I could send you some more private info that I also need help with?

Evan

Genevieve P.

Hi @Evan Fowler

If you have private information that you need help with, I would suggest reaching out to Smartsheet Support with screen captures as they will be able to review private information.

If you're looking for training, you can check to see if your company/plan has access to Smartsheet's Center of Excellence which has a number of eLearning courses you can go through.

(Note: if you are eligible for this but cannot remember your access code, the System Admin for your organization will have this code. You can find out who that is by clicking your profile icon, then finding the main contact under Plan Info).

Otherwise, Community members will be happy to help with any questions/information that is safe to show publicly! You could post screen captures with blocked out data or images of Copied sheets with dummy data and we can do our best to answer your questions.

You may want to start a new thread by posting your own, new question, in order to keep relevant information together in one place and make it easier for members to see what questions need to be answered.

Cheers!

Genevieve

Constantin Hapau

hi @Genevieve P.

Did SM come up with an update re the sort issue when using a form for the vacation register please ?The issue that the new rows created by the new form input, aren't automatically sorted under Parent rows and the fact that we need to either manually move the new submissions up under the person's name.

To SORT the sheet each time you open it to adjust where the rows appear, then manually make them indented as children is not a solution when we are trying to automate everything, right?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Constantin Hapau

Hierarchy in sheets is still a manual operation, so you will need to manually indent rows when they come in from a form (please submit your Enhancement Request here!)

However there is another way to organize your data using Reports, now. You can create a Report then Group by the Employee Name. Then as new rows come into the sheet they they will be automatically sorted under the correct name in the Report. See: Redesigned Reports with Grouping and Summary Functions

Cheers!

Genevieve