We intentionally do not 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 become very cluttered, because there could theoretically be dozens of entries per day
- Checking for conflicts with existing absences would become much more complicated
- Vacation balances would have to handle leave requests accurate to the minute, and it is uncommon to let employees submit minute-precise leave requests.
For example, for a doctor’s appointment, you might want to enter a number of hours or a time. A simple solution: the employee enters a half-day doctor’s visit (for the morning or afternoon) and adds a note in the “Remarks” field, for example, “I’ll be in the office a bit later.”
Colleagues will quickly learn that a half-day doctor’s visit does not mean the employee will actually be absent for half a day, but that the employee will arrive a bit later in the morning or leave a bit earlier in the afternoon.
Additional fields for time entry
If you still want to require start and end times for certain absence types, you can achieve that with additional fields for absence types. For the absence type (for example, doctor’s visit), define the following additional fields:
- Start time
- End time
When an employee enters the absence, the two input fields for start and end times also appear, and they can enter the times. The calendar and the absence details view display the additional fields, so colleagues can see the time window during which the employee will be absent.
Here you can [learn about the additional fields(/absence-management/custom-fields/overview-of-additional-fields/), here you can find out how to [create or edit the additional fields(/absence-management/custom-fields/edit-or-delete-custom-fields/) and here you can see how [the additional fields display in the calendar(/absence-management/custom-fields/displaying-and-reporting-on-custom-fields/).
Record business errands
If you have activated time tracking, you can also [record business errands(/time-tracking/enter-working-hours/record-errands/).