You can set weekly workdays individually in Timebutler. However, you cannot set irregular or alternating weekly workdays, for example “alternating by week Mon-Fri and Mon-Thu” or “Mon-Fri plus every 1st, 3rd, and 5th Saturday of the month”.
There are two reasons why this setting is not available:
- If we made this possible, we would have to offer a wide variety of configuration options, for example “Mon-Thu and every 3rd and 5th Saturday, except when Thursday is a public holiday, then also Friday, but not if colleague X works on a Friday”. That would be complicated and confusing.
- In practice, plans often change anyway, for example when an employee swaps their Friday shift with a colleague or wants to switch the Mon-Thu/Mon-Fri weekly rhythm. Keeping the settings up to date would be cumbersome.
Depending on whether you have time tracking enabled or not, you have the following options:
Alternating weekly workdays with time tracking
Activate all workdays on which the employee could potentially work. To do this, sign in to Timebutler as an admin, click “Settings > Workdays” at the bottom left, then click the blue “Edit” button for the desired employee.
Now create a new absence type “Non-working”. To do this, sign in to Timebutler as an admin and click “Settings” at the bottom left, then “More..” underneath, then “Absence types” on the right. Click the “Create new absence type” button. Enter “Non-working” in the field for the name and set that only admins may enter it by disabling the two options “Supervisors may enter this absence” and “Employees may enter this absence”. Enable the option “Reduces target working time” and then click the blue “Save” button at the bottom.
Then create a recurring entry with the “Non-working” absence for the desired colleague for the weekdays on which the employee does not work (for example for the entire current year). You can [create a recurring entry(/absence-management/enter-absences/absence-entries-recurring-entries/).
You’re done. All weekdays count as workdays for the employee, but the “Non-working” entries mark the undesired days as days off and the system will not count them as workdays for vacation deduction or in the working time account.
An example:
An employee alternates weekly between Monday to Friday and Tuesday to Friday, so they have every second Monday off. Therefore, activate the weekly workdays Monday to Friday and create a “Non-working” recurring entry for every second Monday from January to December.
This sets Monday as a day off every other week, so the employee works Monday to Friday one week and then Tuesday to Friday the next, as desired.
Alternating weekly workdays without time tracking
Activate all workdays on which the employee could potentially work. To do this, sign in to Timebutler as an admin, click “Settings > Workdays” at the bottom left, then click the blue “Edit” button for the desired employee.
The employee then only needs to make sure they enter vacation only on the days they would actually work; otherwise, too many vacation days will be deducted.
An example:
An employee alternates weekly between Monday to Friday and Monday to Thursday, so they have every second Friday off. Therefore, activate the weekly workdays Monday to Friday.
If the employee wants to take two weeks of vacation, they must not submit a vacation request for 2 weeks, because that would deduct 2 x 5 = 10 vacation days.
Instead, they submit one vacation request from Monday to Friday (= 5 vacation days) and another request from Monday to Thursday (= 4 days), so the system deducts 9 vacation days correctly.