How can I use Smartsheet to track employee time off/vacation schedules?

SashaR

We are starting to use Smartsheet for more and more things across the organization and one area we are looking to streamline is employees vacation schedules. Does anyone here use Smartsheet to track employee time off/vacations and how do you do it? 

Dr. Holly Pope

We created a sheet where employee logs thier days and type of vacation/floating holiday. 

Our sheet headers are: 

Employee, Vacation Days (#), Start Date, End Date, Commnets

We then have Parent Rows for each member and then section for Vacation/Personal days and Work Travel days. We have a small team, so it is easy to keep up with by scrolling. If you have a large number of employees, you could add it (and even use a form if wanted for them to add and you approve). If you do this you will want to take out parent row like we have and have all the headers we have, but add Description and have it set up as dropdown (vacation, floating holiday, or work travel). Doing it this way will allow you to sort per dates and also use the calendar view for who is in/out of the office. Please let me know if you have questions or if I need to provide more details for clarity. 

Alexander Shochat

I am using smartsheet to allign my resource management plan with my employees vacations and holidays.

For vacations I built separate sheet, as well fot Holidays and all appears on same view now for resources management. Not ideal situation, as to see vacations actually I need to put 100% allocation of the person, and than it come out on resource management plan as red.

Stephanie Taylor

I have done something simular as well.  I created a Smartsheet for vacations and a seperate one for meetings/events that is synched with Google Calendar.  Then I customized a web form for each employee to place on their desktop.  They fill out the form and hit submit.  At that time I have a notification set up to email the boss about the request.  The boss approves/denies the request and then a second notification alerts the employee of the approval/denial plus it automatically gets placed on the calendar. 

 

This eliminates extra and/or lost paperwork plus no can say they forgot to do something because SmartSheets reminders every step of the way.

 

In the  

Chris Winfield

Stephanie,

 

We are trying to implement a similar vacation planner for our team. We can get the notification sent to the boss alright, but what we can't figure out a good solution for is getting a notification sent back to the staff member when the boss approves the request. 

 

Could I ask for a bit more detail about how your system works in this respect?

 

Thanks,

 

Chris

Stephanie Taylor

Chris,

 

I set up one of the columns as a contact column.  The employee enters their email address (or I have it prepopluated in the web form) and then I set up a reminder (see below) for the date of apporval.  Smartsheets sends a reminder to the email address.  The only down fall to this is that the date of approval needs to be enter in as the next day for the reminder to be sent. 

 

I hope this helps.

 

Jagel Pinillo

Is there a template we can use out there for this purpose?

 

SashaR

Jagel, check out the Team Cavation Schedule and the Non-Project Tasks for Resource Management template. 

Tony Davidson - SmartSheet Certified User 2016

I used this template below and it's great..just made some slight adjustments to it!  The alert functionality I was hoping would be more automatic though.  I have setup the alerts as described and it still hasn't sent after setting it up and entering the approval date as tomorrow.  Can anyone answer why it is delayed?  I want to make sure my employee is notified of the approval alert ASAP instead of waiting another day.  Also, how do I get the email addresses to show up instead of just "Email Address"? Thanks!

 

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/here-time-keeping-smartsheet

davidlap

Please add my vote for tracking non working time per user. Currently I add vacation time as a task but it is difficult to have the task dates match the actual dates that the user took because we typically are making frequent updates to the other tasks such as changing task duration or changing resource assignment. When this happens the vacation task shifts forward or backward in time. In some cases it is not a big deal if it doesn't match exactly but I many people do not understand why their vacation task dates do not match their actual dates and I find myself having to repeatedly explain the shortcomings of Smartsheets. 

Kerry Nicollet

I am currently setting up a PTO tracking sheet up for my department but have hit a hurdle with regards to not displaying denied requests on the calendar. Does anyone have a solution to this problem?

ChrisC

Any update from the development team yet, regarding the possibility of setting 'non working days' by individual user and not just project/team? This seems a fundamental omission in the Smartsheet system as a project planning tool. I'm using the common workaround of having a separate sheet to log individual vacation dates, but this still requires manual identification and re-planning of projects when the resource over-allocation occurs during vacations. It would be much better if the system was able to automatically re-plan tasks as it does for weekends and other non working days set at project/team level.

A helpful way of applying an individual user non working day would be if it were possible to allocate a flag in a predefined column to specific project plan line entries to set them as an overriding allocation that forces other resource allocations to be replanned rather than adding to the % allocation.

manojpapisetty

I hit the exact same problem but lucky enough found a workaround. I generated a new report which filters only requests that are approved. Now this calendar will have only requests that are approved. 

Kristen Helmers

How are you using the report to generate information into a calendar?  Creating a similar report, when I try to publish it only provides a rich format, not the ability to publish to a calendar.

So I am still stuck with how to prevent get denied requests to the calendar.

Jackson

I'd love to see the ability to mark vacation days as non-work days (like weekends) as you mentioned.  I'm going to open up a ticket and see if I can get any info from SS.  If I do I'll update.