Managing holiday bookings

Holidays are statutory (civic) holidays that users are entitled to take off in your organization. You can set up holiday calendars that outline what holidays each user is entitled to.

If you need to track holiday time off balances and amounts, a time off booking needs to be created for each holiday to record time off taken.

You can add these bookings manually, or you can have them automatically added to all holidays. Options for manual mass addition of holiday bookings are available.

Should we use auto-population or add bookings manually?

Most companies will choose to auto-populate, and use manual addition options as a back-up, if they need to correct bookings. This ensures bookings are created, without you having to do anything.

However, in some cases, customers can’t or choose not to use auto-population. For example, you can’t auto-populate if you don’t use timesheets in your system. Also, you might want to manually populate holiday bookings ahead of timesheet generation, so you can plan schedules and resourcing appropriately.

If you choose not to auto-populate, ensure you have a process for adding bookings in place so you don’t forget.

Correcting existing bookings

If you generate bookings with errors, you can delete them, and user the manual mass addition features to re-create the bookings. There is no way of changing an existing booking without first deleting it.

Assigning a time off type for holidays

For auto-population and mass addition of bookings to work, Polaris needs to know what time off type to use to populate bookings. Therefore, you need to assign a time off type for holidays at: Administration > Time Off > Time Off Settings.

You can allow holiday bookings using any time off types you choose. When a holiday is included in a booking, it is counted as 0 days taken, regardless of the time off type the user selects.

This is the only time off type that can be used to create time off on a holiday. Therefore, to record time off taken on holidays, you’ll need to ensure a time off type for holidays is selected, so that bookings can be created using this type.

Setting up the time off types for holidays

To assign a time off type for holidays:

Go to Administration > Time Off > Time Off Settings.
Set the Time Off Type for Holidays field.
Click Save.

Troubleshooting holiday population issues

Refer to the topics listed below for information on how to handle issues involving holiday bookings.

FAQs

Why would we want to use anything other than the Holiday time off type for booking holidays?

Being able to choose a time off type for holidays keeps the system flexible. You can rename the type, or create a new time off type for this purpose, if you choose.

What happens if an employee includes a holiday booking when making a vacation booking?

When a holiday is included in a booking, it is counted as 0 days taken, regardless of the time off type the user selects.

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