Leave Approval in TimeTrak  

Over View:
TimeTrak can Approve time and stock recorded within TimeTrak via “Approvals” as per the below Approval whitepaper:
https://timetrak.co.nz/blog/category/approvals-within-timetrak-21-3/

From release 23.1, Approvals have been enhanced for leave approval.

For a full list of requirements, please review below;

Table of Contents

1. Settings
2. Leave Approval Work Group
3. Leave Grid in TimeTrak Professional
4. Requesting Leave in TimeTrak Professional
5. Requesting Leave in TimeTrak APP
6. Approving leave in TimeTrak Professional
7. Query leave in TimeTrak Professional
8. Deny leave in TimeTrak Professional
9. Leave Notification in TimeTrak APP
10. Leave Notification in TimeTrak Professional
11. TimeTrak Mobile – Leave Requests

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Settings:

Using the approval settings within TimeTrak;

Staff who require their leave to be approved:

Need to be assigned to a profile with “Time Entries Require Approval” and “Non Productive Time Entries Require Approval” enabled.

Note: Non-productive is often renamed to leave

Their profile should also have “Add Time Entry” and “Add Non-Productive Time Entry” enabled, allowing staff to add leave time entries.

Staff who need to approve leave:

Need to have a TimeTrak Professional or TimeTrak Full Access licence to log in to the Professional website.

Need to be group administrators of the staff they need to approve Leave for.

Need the ability to “Edit Time Entries.”

Need to be assigned to a profile with “Can Approve Items” and “Can Approve Time Entries” enabled.

Leave Approvers will also need the profile setting “Add Edit and Delete Work Groups” to create their leave approval work groups, or a global administrator will need to create a workgroup as per below and assign it to them.

Leave Approval Work Group:

For staff to get notification of leave requests, a workgroup with “Enable Leave Approval” enabled and the Visibility set to the leave approver should be created.

In this example, Bridget is responsible for approving Leave for Adam, Andrea, Bob, Bruce, David and Greg.

A Work Group has been created, and Visibility is set to Bridget with “Enable Leave Approval” enabled as per below:

Note: For more information on creating Workgroups, see below:
https://timetrak.co.nz/blog/category/ability-to-select-all-users-in-a-workgroup-and-re-order-by-user-name/

Leave Grid within TimeTrak Professional:

As part of the 23.1 release, a new “Leave” grid has been added to TimeTrak Professional.

Users need to go to the main menu and select Edit as per below:

Enable “Leave” to display on the main menu as per below and select Save:

Note: For more information on configuring the layout of the professional menu, see below:

https://timetrak.co.nz/blog/category/video-whats-new-in-timetrak-20-1

Once enabled, “Leave” is available in the main menu.
On selection, a leave grid is displayed showing leave entries from today for the users the logged-in user has access to:

On selection, a leave grid is displayed showing leave entries from today for the users the logged-in user has access to:

This grid is like other grids within TimeTrak, providing the ability to filter by groups and users at the top as well as re-arranging the columns within the grid and grouping the data by a column such as month as per below:

Allowing the data to be grouped like below.

There is also the ability to pop the leave grid to another window or export the data to a PDF or spreadsheet.

Providing the ability for the Leave grid to be used as an outboard or quick reference point to see what staff are on leave.

Requesting Leave in TimeTrak Professional

Professional staff can request leave by simply adding a time entry in the future for the requested date against a Non-Productive time analysis code (Leave) as they would usually do as per below:

They can also add a leave time entry via the new “leave” grid within Professional by selecting the plus icon and choosing the type of leave from the selection as per below:

When selecting the leave type, a time entry against this leave type with “fill day” enabled by default can be displayed, where users can change the date and click save.

Note: When requesting multiple days of leave, the repeat function can be used to repeat the entry for the number of days of leave required. In the below example, sick leave is required for both Thursday and Friday:

Requesting Leave in TimeTrak APP:

The APP has a new Leave option within the search grid below.

By default, this will display future leave; however, the start date in the filter can be adjusted to show previous leave.

New leave requests can added to leave;

Select the applicable leave type and the start/ end date of the leave request.

Enter additional information (if required) in the narration and click SAVE:

Approving Leave in TimeTrak Professional:

When Leave Approvers login to TimeTrak for the first time for the day, the Alerts screen will pop up if there are:

1. Any unapproved leave time entries after the system “Lock Record Before Date.”
2. For staff in a workgroup with “enable leave approval” enabled that belong to the logged-in user as per below:

This alert screen can be closed but will pop up if additional leave requests are added from the last time the screen was closed and every 4 hours, as a reminder, if there are unapproved leave entries.

Users can select one or multiple entries and right-click approve as per below:

This will refresh the grid, and the approved leave entries will be gone, only showing outstanding entries:

The time entry can be opened via the time entry icon as per below:

From the Leave Approvals alert, there is also the ability to “Open Work Group Calendar” as per below, which allows the approver to ensure that other staff in the work group are not also on leave before the leave is approved.

Entries can then be approved via the workgroup calendar by selecting the entry and pressing V on the keyboard, which will provide the below prompt to confirm you wish to approve the entry:

Note: Multiple entries can be selected by holding down the Ctrl key on the keyboard whilst selecting entries, which will display the black boarded around selected entries, then pressing V on the keyboard to confirm the approval of entries.

From the Leave Approvals alert, there is also the ability to pop the Approval by user report for the specified user showing only unapproved entries from the systems “Lock Records Before Date” + 365 days where the leave can be reviewed and approved as per usual approval processes.

If the logged-in user has multiple workgroups with “enable leave approval” enabled, a user’s leave request will display twice as per below. It is recommended to prevent confusion, duplicate workgroups with leave approval enabled do not have the same user in them if they belong to the same leave approver:

Depending on Approval requirements, another user could approve leave via the calendar or manually in the approval reports before you are notified.

Leave entry requests will also be emailed to approvers daily at midnight as a reminder, should they not be logging into TimeTrak on a regular basis:

Query leave in TimeTrak Professional:

Approvers can query a single leave time entry via the “Approval by user” by clicking the query icon against an entry as per below:

This will pop an approval query form where you can enter your query against the entry before clicking save & close as per below:

When a query is against a leave entry, this icon can be displayed in the approval by user report as per below:

As well as within the Leave Approval alerts screen below:

As well as the calendar as per below:

Queried icons and what they mean have been added to the TimeTrak Professional legend as per below:

Note: Multiple entries can be queried at the same time via a calendar view or workgroup calendar by selecting multiple entries (control down Ctrl and selecting multiple entries)

Right-clicking and selecting Query Entries as per below or selecting Q on the keyboard

Multiple entries can also be selected and queried via a right-click on the alerts screen as per below:

These actions will create the query window with the selected time entry id’s displayed.

Note: Selecting the ID will open the applicable entry for review:

Multiple entries can also be selected and queried via a right-click on the alerts screen as per below:

When staff respond to the query, the entry will display in the leave approval alerts again with an icon to indicate the query has been responded to as per below:

On opening the query, approvers can mark the Query as “Query Resolved and Approved” to approve the leave or “Query Denied” as per below:

Review Queries in Professional:

Any queries against a time entry will be recorded against the time entry on the activities tab below, where the query window can be opened.

Queries against leave can also be accessed by right-clicking on an entry and selecting “Open Approval Query” as per below:

Deny Leave in TimeTrak Professional:

Similar to querying leave, denying leave can be done;

1. Via the alerts screen right, click and Deny Leave as below:

2. Or via the calendar on right click of one or multiple entries or by pressing N on the keyboard:

This will pop the Approval form as per below, where a reason the leave is being denied is required to be entered before clicking Save & Close:

Denied leave will display with the icon below:

Until the employee acknowledges the leave being denied, at which point it will be deleted.

Leave Notification in TimeTrak APP:

When leave is approved, queried or denied, a push notification will be sent to APP users’ devices:

Notifications can be seen on the home screen below:

Notifications will display until they have been viewed or marked as “read.” The option to mark all notifications as read is available at the bottom of the screen:

For leave that is denied on selection, staff can see the reason it has been rejected and need to “Acknowledge and Delete”, which will remove the leave request from TimeTrak:

Leave that has been queried on selection will display the approver’s query with the ability for APP users to send a response as per below:

Leave Notification in TimeTrak Professional:

Professional staff requesting leave can also get email notifications when leave is queried or denied if the below profile setting “Email Leave Approval Queries” is enabled against their profile.

These emails, as per below, are a prompt for these entries to be actioned in TimeTrak Professional:

Denied leave time entries need to be opened where the reason they have been denied as per below staff then need to Acknowledge and delete the entry, which will remove the entry from the calendar:

Queried entries can be right-clicked to open the Approval query as per below:

Where a response can be added and Save and close:

Email notification is also sent daily at midnight to notify of leave that has been approved.

TimeTrak Mobile – Leave Requests:

Leave approval has been designed for TimeTrak Professional and the TimeTrak APP.

Leave can be entered within TimeTrak Mobile by adding a leave time entry; email notifications will be sent if “Email Leave Approval Queries” is enabled on the user’s profile; however, there is no ability for mobile users to reply to queries or acknowledge leave has been denied and remove so this would need to be managed in the office.