We intentionally don’t allow you to specify a start/end time or a duration in hours/minutes for absence entries. There are several reasons for this:
- The calendar view would quickly become cluttered, since there could theoretically be dozens of entries per day.
- Checking for conflicts with existing absences would become significantly more complicated.
- Vacation balances would have to handle minute-precise vacation requests, and giving employees that level of precision is uncommon in practice.
For example, for a doctor’s appointment you may want to specify a number of hours or a time. The simple solution: you record a half-day doctor’s appointment (morning or afternoon) and add a note in the Remarks field — for example, “I’ll be in the office a bit later.”
Your colleagues will quickly learn that a half-day doctor’s appointment doesn’t mean you’ll actually be absent for half the day; it means you’ll arrive a bit later in the morning or leave a bit earlier in the afternoon.
Extra fields for entering times
If you still want start and end times to be specified for certain absence types, you can do this with extra fields for absence types. For the absence type (for example, doctor’s appointment), define the following extra fields:
- Start time
- End time
When an employee then enters the absence, the two input fields for start and end times also appear, and they can fill in the times. The extra fields are shown in the calendar and in the absence detail view, so colleagues can see the time window during which the employee will be absent.
You can learn more about extra fields, find out how to create or edit extra fields, and see how extra fields are displayed in the calendar.
Record business errands
If you have activated time tracking, you can also record business errands.