In Timebutler, you can enter vacation requests in half days, full days, or multiple days, but not by the hour. The reason is that very few companies plan vacation by the hour. In addition, recording vacation by the hour would greatly complicate Timebutler in many areas and features.
You can still achieve hourly vacation planning in Timebutler by repurposing the overtime feature. When you enable the overtime feature, Timebutler keeps an overtime account for each employee. You can set an overtime balance as of January 1 for each employee: enter the vacation in hours there. If an employee has, for example, 25 days of vacation at 8 hours each, enter 200 there (25 x 8 = 200).
Each employee can then request overtime reduction - this corresponds to vacation requests. The manager approves the overtime reduction, and the hours are deducted from the overtime account. The overtime account thus always shows the current vacation balance (in hours).
However, this alternative has disadvantages, as follows:
- The links and buttons for vacation requests and vacation accounts remain active, but employees should no longer use them.
- Some features in Timebutler apply specifically to vacation, for example vacation blackouts and warnings or the setting to allow overdrawing the vacation balance, and you can no longer use these with the overtime feature.
- You cannot enable the time tracking feature: you can therefore use Timebutler only for absence and vacation planning, not for time tracking.
If you still want to enable the overtime feature for hour-based vacation planning, proceed as follows:
1) Enable the overtime feature
Log in to Timebutler as an admin and click “Settings” at the bottom left, then “More..” below it, then “Overtime feature” on the right. Click the “Enable overtime feature” button. On that page you have various options for managing overtime, which you can configure as you wish. Then click the “Enable overtime feature” button again to confirm
2) Require approval for overtime
Then click “Settings > More..” at the bottom left, then “Absence types” on the right. For “Overtime”, click the green button with the pencil. Remove all checkmarks under “Editing permissions” and all under “Delete own entries”. Under “Approval”, enable the option “The manager must approve the request”. This ensures that if an employee (accidentally) records overtime, which would increase the vacation balance, the manager can simply reject that request.
3) Transfer vacation credit to the overtime account
Click “Settings > Vacation entitlement” at the bottom left. In the “Overtime credit from previous year” column, you can now enter the starting overtime credit (i.e., the vacation quota).
4) Set up a vacation blackout
Click “Settings > Vacation blackout” at the bottom left. Create a new vacation blackout for the entire current year from January 1 to December 31 (and ideally another one for next year) so that no employee can submit vacation requests anymore.
5) Inform employees
Inform employees and managers that vacation is no longer managed via vacation requests but via overtime-reduction requests, and that the vacation balance can be found in the overtime account with hour-level (to-the-minute) precision, not in the vacation account.