Time off booking rules allow you to control the maximum number of people in a cohort who can have leave at the same time.

To set this up, go to

Administration > Company > Settings > Time off settings (global)

In the Self service section there is an option called 'Apply time off booking rules' which should be set to Yes.

After selecting Yes, there are 5 further options which need to be set:

Time off rules - selection - this is how we determine who is in the same cohort with the options being Manager, Site, Department and Team.

NOTE: Team is not the same as manager and allows you to manually specify people in the same team for the purposes of using this feature only.

Time off rules - number - this is the maximum number of people who can be off in the above cohort/selection.

Time off rules - percentage - this is the maximum percentage of people who can be off in the above cohort/selection.

Time off rules - include pending time off? - when looking at who is off, this option determines if we should include or exclude pending time off which has not yet been approved.

Time off rules - action - finally, this controls what happens when there are more people off than allowed. The options are "Alert" which gives a visual warning to the employee and manager but does not stop them booking the request and "Block from booking" which will physically stop them from booking the requested time off.

As an example, in a team of 10 people you may want no more than 5 people off at any time, so you would set up the rule to say 5 - however, in a team of 6 people you may instead want to have a maximum of 3 people off so this is where percentage and number works together and why both are required.

In this example, we could enter, for example, number as 5 and percentage as 50 - this means that we work out both values for every request and then we take the lowest one and apply that as the maximum allowed value.

So in the team of 10 that would be 5 people as both 50% of 10 and 5 give the same value but in the team of 6 we would only allow 3 to be off as 50% of the team is 3 which is lower than the maximum entered number of 5. 

The message returned varies depending on the user level of the user making the request. If the request is being made via Self Service then the message is:

"There are other employees in this team with time off booked during the requested dates"

If the request is being added outside of Self service (i.e. by a manager via the Time off module) then the message is:

 

"The following employee(s) also have time booked off during the requested dates: Name1, Name 2 etc"