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 set up hour-based 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 and enter the vacation in hours there. For example, if an employee has 25 days of vacation at 8 hours each, enter 200 (25 x 8 = 200).
Employees can then request overtime reduction — this corresponds to a vacation request. The Manager approves the overtime reduction, and the hours are deducted from the overtime account. The overtime account therefore always shows the current vacation balance in hours.
This alternative has the following disadvantages:
- The links and buttons for vacation requests and vacation balances 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 option to allow overdrawing the vacation balance. These cannot be used 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. In the bottom left, click Settings, then More… below it, and then Overtime feature on the right. Click Enable overtime feature. On this page you will find various options for managing overtime, which you can configure as you wish. Then click Enable overtime feature again to confirm.
2. Require approval for overtime
In the bottom left, click Settings > More…, then click 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 way, if an employee (accidentally) records overtime — which would otherwise increase the vacation balance — the Manager can simply reject the request.
3. Transfer vacation credit to the overtime account
In the bottom left, click Settings > Vacation entitlement. 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
In the bottom left, click Settings > Vacation blackout. Create a new vacation blackout for the entire current year from January 1 to December 31 (and ideally another one for the following year) so that no employee can submit vacation requests.
5. Inform employees
Let employees and Managers know that vacation is no longer managed via vacation requests but via overtime-reduction requests. The current vacation balance can now be found in the overtime account with hourly (to-the-minute) precision.