Time off requests can cause a lot of headaches and it’s an important subject for your employees. Having a simple and efficient process for requesting and responding to time off is a huge benefit.
An out of the box time off request and calendar exists within the field service app and you can bring this over to the other sections if you have access to the field service app. In our example today we did not have access to the field service app as we only utilized the sales and service sections, so we created a new entity and process directly within Customer Engagement.
Here are the steps we took:
Created a new entity called “Time Off Request”.
For the entity we made it available under sales and service as those are the two areas the employees used. This entity was set up to allow for notes, but does not require activities or document management. Queues are not used in our example, but as a process you could utilize time off queues versus an email notification directly to the manager.
Created custom fields and designed the form.
Here are the fields we created/updated:
- Employee
- This was set up as a look-up field and was pointed to users.
- Department
- Created as an option set with different team names. This allows us to track how many requests we have by team and manage staffing levels.
- Start Date
- Included both date and time so requests could be full days or just a few hours.
- End Date
- Set up the same way as the start date field.
- Time Off Reason
- Another option set where employees could choose PTO, Unpaid or Other time off reasons. If you have other reasons such as bereavement or jury duty those could be added to the list.
- Status Reason
- This field already exists but we did make a couple changes. Under the active section we changed active to requested. Under the inactive section we added two and renamed one so we have approved, denied and cancelled, with the default being approved.
Once we had all our fields created we designed the form. Here is what our form looks like:
Set up workflows.
We determined a couple different workflows were necessary to keep this process flowing smoothly.
- Upon new time off request.
- When a new time off request is saved the workflow gives the record a proper name based on the employee name and start date of request, then an email is sent to the manager alerting them to the time off request. The manager can access the record directly from the email. Here is our email set-up:
- When the request is approved or declined.
- A manager approves or declines our record by deactivating the record and then choosing the reason. Once the record is deactivated it triggers a workflow to send an email to the employee notifying them.
Updated/Created Views
We updated the default view to use our new custom fields to allow for easy filtering.
Here is what the active time off request view looked like:
A custom view was also created to show all approved and requested dates.
This view enables a manager to see all requests for their department so they don’t approve too many people off on the same day.
This process was fairly simple to set up but was very beneficial. This resulted in time savings and prevented negative morale issues due to problems or delays with time off requests.
-Jerica Coleman, CRM and Power BI Consultant
