Online holiday planner – what features do you need?

As you can imagine online holiday planners like any software niche can have many software choices available, which can make the selection process a bit daunting.

Of course, the requirements that your business requires for leave management can differ from those from other organisations, these can vary based on the size of your business as well as the type of staffing you have e.g. part-time workers vs full time.

Here are some items you should consider when selecting your holiday planner to ensure you meet your businesses needs:

Self-administration

When deciding on what leave management solution to use, you should try to aim for one which allows you to fully self-administer the software, that way, when changes are required, you have the right access possible to make the changes without needing to submit support requests.

Within self-administered solutions you would usually have multi-level user access as a result. This is particularly useful to allow specific users to be admins or approvers which can allow them and only them to view certain information which may be deemed sensitive e.g. somebody from HR may want to be an admin to track sickness of all the employees in reporting and view their leave entitlement, whereas a regular user will just want to see their own calendar for their bookings and leave requests and an approver likewise will want to approve or decline leave requests.

Configuration and customisation

Any online holiday planner should provide a range of configuration and customisation options, including but not limited to:

• Leave and lieu allowance (TOIL) on as a company default plus an individual user override
• Customisable leave types to add your own, mark them as approval required or not, as well as should it consume the user’s allowance
• Customiseable role/office/department to represent your organisation structure accurately which will help with leave management
• Restrictions around how many users and for how long users can be off at the same time as other users
• Approver(s) per department and multi-stage approval
• Public/Bank holiday customisation and multi-country selection if you operate in other countries or if your organisation doesn’t have specific days off as bank holidays e.g. part-time staff
• Integration to your calendar and other tools e.g. Slack

Automatic leave allowance carry over and fine grain adjustments of lieu

An online holiday planner should always offer a capability of automatic carry over of holiday allowance via TOIL (Time Off In Lieu) as well as reset of allowance when your company year ends as it’s a key advantage over using a traditional spreadsheet to manage leave. Equally, the company year-end should be able to be defined by day and month to fully align with your organisation’s practices.

Easy to use reporting

Within any online holiday planner, reporting is essential. If you can’t quickly see a summary of who is off when, what leave is left to be used up before the company year end a full audit trail, it can be very difficult to manage in the same way email and or excel tracking options are.

Reporting can also prove to be useful in scenarios where you may have implemented the Bradford Factor and need to calculate the scores of users who are abusing sick leave.

Good support and product documentation

So by now, you are probably starting to see the benefits of simplifying your leave management processes and why this type of product makes sense, even with this scenario you can still get stuck with using the software if the support and documentation is lacking.

Try to find a leave management software solution which offers extensive online documentation so you or your users can easily find the help they need. Ideally this would be in the form of in-application support, so the user can read the help guides without leaving the platform.

A cloud-based web application

An online holiday planner or leave management solution should ideally be cloud based to ensure it’s accessible for all of your users from any location. It also lifts the burden on needing any complex IT involvement or IT projects, thus also reducing costs of hardware and other software required.

Try to assess each leave management platform accordingly to ensure cloud based hosting is an option without the need to install or download any software.Next stepsCreate yourself a checklist which would allow you to grade each holiday planner a success or not. This will allow you to see what your success factors would be, as well as which leave management products would be most suited for your business.

As well as this, always ask any questions directly to the vendor if you’re unsure. This can give you an early view as to how quickly they can respond to your requests as well. The staff at ScheduleLeave are always on hand to help, you can get in contact with us using the (?) In the bottom right of any page on our marketing site as well as in our own software.

 

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