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Leave Wizard The Most Powerful Online Staff Leave Planner
It’s all about context and visibility
Here at LeaveWizard we really do have some great customers who actively taking an interest in the development of our product and we really do like trying to keep them happy. This month I am confident that the changes we’ve implemented will put a few smiles on peoples faces because they make managing leave even easier than ever before.
New Feature: Re-designed Administration Dashboard
For a while now we’ve had the same or similar dashboard for employees, line managers and administrators but after getting out of the building and talking with our customers we found that it actually made a lot of sense to change the layout for line managers and administrators as the context under which you are using the dashboard changes significantly.
As an employee your main focus is to request leave for yourself, see how much allowance you have remaining and potentially whether a colleague is supposed to be in today or not but as a line manager or administrator the focus shifts slightly to be more about managing your team and recording leave and absences for others. That’s why we’ve given line managers and administrators a more team focused dashboard and we’ve re-arranged the layout to be more management focused.
The administration dashboard also defaults the allowance view to show your teams allowance therefore reducing the number of clicks you need to make to find out key information about your staff.
New Feature: Setting Employee Context
As part of the administration dashboard re-design we’ve added a new capability to set the current employee context. This means that you can simply type in the name of an employee and hit the return key – this will then set the context to that employee and therefore any leave or absence related action which you subsequently perform will be carried out in the context of that employee.
This means that when you are investigating leave, absence or overtime for a specific employee or you are requesting time off for someone where ever you navigate through the application the employee context will be remembered. To remove the employee context simply click the ‘X’ next to their name.
Enhancement: Moving key actions into focus
As you can see from the above image, another part of the re-design is to make all key actions available in the main focus area of the screen. We’ve moved the Recent Messages, Pending Approvals and Pending Overtime request messages to the right hand column as we had feedback that it was more useful to have the action buttons at the top of the left hand pane.
New Feature: Easier Access to Administration Options
Some of the feedback we received was that setting up of administration options often felt a little disjointed from the rest of the application and it was often several clicks of the mouse before you got to where you wanted to go. This new feature is a new “Mega Dropdown” menu which provides instant access to all key administration functions from where ever you are in the application.
As part of this menu re-design we have moved access to the introductory wizard pages on the menu as well because we had feedback that it was wasting key screen real estate by being on the main dashboard.
We have also created a new calendars option on the main menu which provides easy access to the available calendar/wall chart views which includes a new “Outlook” style calendar view which I describe below.
New Feature: Outlook Style Leave Calendar View
For a while our leave charts were hidden behind a couple of clicks and were displayed in a pop-up window which a number of customers felt that it was “hiding” some of the most valuable information that LeaveWizard has to offer.
Well, we agreed and therefore we’ve made some changes to how leave can be visualised. The new leave calendar view provides an Outlook style view of all employees that are on leave and provides Day, Week, Month and Timeline views all of which make use of the full screen and can be linked to or bookmarked if you want to go directly to these views.
The leave calendar view also allows a user to select a date range and simply right-click to receive a context menu allowing them to request leave for themselves or others.
New Feature: Seven Day View on the Dashboard
By making some of the previously mentioned changes to the dashboard we were able to free up enough screen real estate to add a new view. As part of changing the focus to making leave more visible to employees we’ve introduced a new view that highlights what is happening over the next seven days. The view is scrollable so you can change the dates and see who is in an out over the next week if you need to, you can also right-click on the view to request leave either for yourself or someone else if you have the right role.
Other: Small changes and fixes
- General performance optimizations throughout
We hope you find the new release useful and if there’s anything we can help with then contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.
Please continue telling us what you think and add a request or vote for any of the features that already exist so that we make sure we are developing the features that you want to see the most.
Faster, simpler, easier leave planning
January has been a pretty busy month for the LeaveWizard team. We’ve really been working hard to deliver performance enhancements and features that help to make LeaveWizard even faster and easier to use.
Leave Type Visibility User Groups
We’ve extended our user group functionality with a new type called a “Leave Type Visibility” user group. Its sole purpose is to allow Administrators to restrict which leave types can or cannot be seen by employees within the company, take a look at this article for more details.
Handy employee allowance tool tips
We’ve extended various parts of LeaveWizard with some useful tool tips that provide instant allowance, leave year and work pattern information about any employees. Simply hover over an employee’s name and the details will appear.
Other: Small changes and fixes
- Added booked by to room booking iCal feed (Outlook/Google Calendar integration
- Added public holidays for Norway, Belgium and Slovakia
- Performance optimized for inclusive of public holiday recalculation
We hope you find the new release useful and if there’s anything we can help with then contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.
Please continue telling us what you think and add a request or vote for any of the features that already exist so that we make sure we are developing the features that you want to see the most.
New year, new features
We rarely leave such a gap between our releases and many of you would have anticipated this one for the features and enhancements it makes available. We also hope it you will find that it contains some pleasant surprises.
Overtime Approval Routing
The original implementation of overtime was that approvals were always being sent to Administrators and not line managers or approvers. We have now allowed this to be configured from the welcome page of the setup wizard. You can choose if overtime requests should be sent for approval to the configured approvers if the overtime requests TOIL or team leaders if they are configured as approvers or if that fails or you just prefer it that way the requests will still be send to Administrators.
Bradford Factor Start Date
Bradford factor is always calculated for the past 364 days. However what if you only want to start it from this year and you want to disregard any previous absences? To accommodate this case we have added a start date to Bradford factor, This means that you can configure a date and calculation swill start from either that date or 364 days before today whichever is less.
Department Filter in Address Book
If you have a large number of employees added to the system it is a good idea to be able to shorten the list in the address book if it is to be useful for locating information. For that reason we added filter by department to enhance search and reduce list size which generally makes the page more useful.
Cover Employee can be made Mandatory
We’ve had the cover employee feature in the system for some time and since it has proved to be popular we have been asked if we can make it mandatory. Our solution was to allow configuration per leave type. This means you are now able to specify if employees will be forced to select cover on submitting requests of certain leave types that you have configured to have cover as mandatory field.
Room bookings are now published
As of this release the room bookings made within LeaveWizard will be published to subscribers and can be viewed in Outlook or Google calendar or similar. This is a nice enhancement to the room booking feature making it more usable and helpful.
General Performance Enhancements
And last but not least we have made a huge amount of improvements across the system. For instance remaining allowances are now loading about 10-15 times faster, the approvals list is about 3-4 times quicker. In general we have implemented more than 20 individual performance improvements to make LeaveWizard faster and more responsive.
We hope you find the new version to be better and more useful and if there’s anything you’d like to talk to us about do not hesitate to email us at support@leavewizard.com.
And finally Happy New Year! We hope it is successful for you and your business.
No tricks, it’s all about the treats
This month’s release sees several usability fixes and enhancements to help bring a nice warm fuzzy feeling whilst the cold October nights are drawing in. The changes are as follows:
Main navigation moved to the very top of the page
Screen real estate is king and making the most of it can be a tricky thing to accomplish but we think we are moving in the right direction. We have removed our logo and moved the main navigation bar up into its place. This is all in a bid to provide our users with more space on the screen that will allow you to focus more on the content and less on the paraphernalia around it including unnecessary lines.
Cover employee can be changed by an Administrator
We have had the capability to choose a person to cover your leave for a long while but this month we are enhancing this feature with the ability for an approver to change who the cover employee should be prior to approving the leave.
Approvers can see an employees remaining allowance before approving
Another enhancement for approvers is the ability to see an employees remaining allowance on the approval details page – a small change but hopefully a useful one.
Allowances can now be reset to their default value for all users if required
Last month sae the introduction of the ability to delete leave types – however, there was a restriction which meant that if an allowance had been given to an employee for that leave type then you were unable to delete the leave type. So this month with added functionality to reset the employee allowances to the leave type default which then means that you will be able to delete any unwanted leave types.
Export for team member allowances
We’ve added an Export to CSV option to the allowance list so that you can get easy access to allowance information to use for whatever purpose you need.
Public holidays can be imported from the welcome page
A small enhancement to the welcome wizard page that allows public holidays to be selected and imported at the first stage of setup, we hope this feature is yet another step to making LeaveWizard even easier to configure and use.
Other: Small changes and fixes
- Rejecting leave from within the Manage Leave Requests page actually resulted in a leave request being approved incorrectly
- The CVV number would not accept a security code start with 0
- The year selector has been modified to show leave year in the format 2012-13
- When requesting leave in hours, if the time taken was prior to the end of the work day then the wrong hours would be calculated for the leave request and the back to work date would be incorrectly calculated
- Removed erroneous “we have a new dashboard for you” messages that some users may have seen
- If a cancel event fails it now fails more gracefully instead of crashing
We hope you find the new release useful and if there’s anything we can help with then contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.
Please continue telling us what you think and add a request or vote for any of the features that already exist so that we make sure we are developing the features that you want to see the most.