Leave/Holiday

Scheduling in a carer's leave allows you to manage your rosters for when staff are away. You can enter in leave through a carer's record, in the leave tab, or ad hoc through the roster/agenda. The leave tab shows any leave that has been entered for a carer, as well as holiday pay estimates and hours accrued. These sections are further explained in the article: Holiday/Leave Pay.

 

Leave or Unavailability?

Although unavailability (on the carer's schedule) and leave are similar in that they both appear on the roster and bookings typically shouldn't be rostered during either, they represent fundamentally different concepts and have different behaviours, which should influence when you decide to use one or the other:

  • Leave is a one-off period of time away from work. It can pull through to payroll, be categorised by leave type for reporting purposes, and prevents new bookings from being allocated to that carer entirely (although you can choose for existing bookings to remain allocated).
  • Unavailability represents a one-off or recurring restriction or preference on when someone chooses not to receive bookings, and is primarily used to visually indicate when a person isn't available on the roster. 

 

Leave Rostering

 

Less than a day

Useful if a carer needs a morning/afternoon off, or even just a couple of hours. When entering leave for less than a day, you can set the following options:

  • Team - Which team's roster this leave should appear on

    • If you only have one team, then it will automatically populate with it

  • Start date - What day the leave will be taking place.

  • Start time - What time the leave is due to start.

  • Duration - How long the leave will be.

  • Type - Select a leave type e.g. annual leave, sick leave - the leave types are editable in Settings → Employees → Leave

  • Override - You can choose if this leave is payable or non-payable, regardless of whether the leave type makes it payable or non-payable

    • If you don't tick to override it, it will match the leave type. This means if the leave type is payable, then this leave will be payable, and if the leave type is non-payable, then this leave will be non-payable too.

  • Reason - The reason for taking the leave

    • You can choose to enter "." or "N/A" if you don't want to specify a reason for the leave

On the roster and agenda, you will see a grey bar only covering the duration input above, this will restrict allocation for the carer.

 

A day or more

At the top, you can switch from "Less than a day" to "A day or more". Rather than inputting a start time and duration, you input a finish date instead. The remaining fields will be the same as "Less than a day".

Using this option will block off the full day for every date selected inclusively, Every day between and including the dates selected will be blocked off on the roster/agenda. How many hours a carer is paid is determined by the holiday pay estimates. See Holiday/Leave Pay for more info.

 

What happens if bookings are already assigned?

If a carer already has bookings assigned when leave is rostered, you will be given the option to either unallocate the bookings, or don't do anything (which leaves the bookings allocated at the same time as the leave). It is recommended that you choose to unallocate bookings wherever possible.

 

What if I want to allocate bookings while carers are on leave?

In some rare situations, you may want to keep bookings allocated to carers even when they're on leave.

To do this:

  1. Temporarily move the finish date to earlier
  2. Create and/or allocate the relevant bookings
  3. Change the finish date back to normal
  4. Choose to not do anything, rather than unallocate
  5. Save your changes

 

Leave Pay

For information about how this is paid, see the article Holiday/Leave Pay.

 

Payable Leave Dates

For paid leave, please only select the dates that you want to pay the carers for. This means that if the carer never works weekends, for example, then payable leave shouldn't ever be rostered for the weekend.

 

The system is not able to tell which days are to be paid and which are not. For example, if a carer is off for 14 days, and they work 4 days a week they can be entitled to 8 days pay from those 14 days. If 14 days are put in the system for paid leave the system will pay the carer for all 14 days. This means that over the course of those 14 days, you will need to put in 8 days of paid leave and 6 of unpaid leave to ensure that you do not overpay for leave. For longer periods of leave, this may require booking it in multiple scheduled leaves.