Absence management

The app delivers out-the-box support for employee and manager leave and absence management.

Employees can:

• See a calendar to manage own absences and see other events, such as training, and payroll cut-off dates
• See a 'peer' calendar to see who else in the team is out
• Book leave and record absence
• Upload attachments, such as doctors notes
• See overlapping peers absences when booking leave
• View leave and time-off entitlements and balances
• See upcoming or pending leave and absences and a complete history of all historical records
• Receive Outlook calendar invitations when booking absence
• Support for existing workflow approval rules configured via Approvals Management

Managers can:

• See all the views an employee can see and act on their behalf
• Use an absence calendar to manage leave and absence across their direct reports
• View a subordinate manager's absence calendar to manager leave and absence for sub-teams
• Use the results of a saved search to view and manager leave and absence for an arbitrary team
• Use a regular calendar planner, or a scheduler view with agenda, week, month, and yearly planner options
• See who's out now and who's out soon with an upcoming absence list
• See a list of team absences pending approval
• See dashboards showing most entitlements left and Bradford-factor sickness

September 2017 updates

The September 2017 update includes all-new absence and timecard features. These require separate installation to the mainline patch so that you can choose when you wish to install and deploy these features.

To install them:

1. Navigate to Applaud Administrator: Setup: Getting started
2. You will see a new option to install the time and absence updates, as pictured below:

Hitting Install Now will immediately begin installation; be sure to read the notes below before you start this process.

Help - this option isn't shown after installing the September 2017 patch

This installation will automatically create both employee and manager pages. To do this, you must have two pages already defined with specific Page Ids:

1. time-and-absence. New employee blocks will be automatically added to this page.
2. team. A new manager Team absence page will be added as a child of this page.

Once you have two pages that use both these Page Ids you should see the option to install the new updates.

New update notes

The installation will make several assumptions about how to automatically create this setup. It's important that you understand what these are so please do read this section carefully.

• Installation starts the moment you hit Install Now
• This process cannot be undone
• It will create multiple new blocks on the time-and-absence page and automatically grant these to your employee role
• It will create a new Team absence page with multiple blocks and will automatically grant these to your manager role
• It makes the assumption you have only one employee role and one manager role
• If your installation was seeded by auto-setup, the roles it grants to will be Applaud Employee Self Service Role and Applaud Manager Self Service Role.
• If your installation was created manually or via the older template patch, it will attempt to discover the employee and manager roles by looking for roles with the name UMX|%ESS% and UMX|%MSS%.
• If multiple roles match this criterion, it will use the role that has the most number of Applaud grants against it.

This process acts as an accelerator to help you rapidly deploy these changes, but the configuration is unlikely to fit your requirements exactly. For example:

• You may wish to remove certain blocks for initial deployment
• You may have multiple employee or manager roles and so need to tweak the access policies for each block by adding and removing grants
• You may wish to re-order the blocks or change the menu structure
• You may want to re-label some of the titles or content
• You may want to add in additional blocks of help content, such as links to policy pages

After initial installation, you are free to re-configure and personalize according to your requirements.

Migrating updates to test and production environments

Please see the notes on running this process. After installation, it's highly likely you will want to make a number of configuration and personalization changes before you are ready to deploy the new pages and blocks in your test and production environments.

Our recommended approach is this:

1. Run this installation process once in your development environment
2. Re-configure and personalize according to your requirements
3. Use the Import and export capabilities to load your finished configuration into test and production environments