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By integrating Absence Management with Employee Scheduling, you can reserve the times of approved absences to avoid double-booking employees for shifts that overlap absence periods.

Benefits of integration

Integrating Absence Management with Employee Scheduling will help you to manage employee absences on your schedule by providing visibility of absent shifts and vacancies created by these absent shifts.

Setting up Employee Scheduling to work with Attendance

A few simple setup steps are required to permit Employee Scheduling to update Attendance. These steps must be performed in NAV.

Prerequisites

  • An unavailable unit must be created and configured for each Area. See Setting up Employee Scheduling.
  • Employees must have a Schedule Area No. configured on the Scheduling section of the Time Entry/Scheduling fast tab of the Employee Time Attendance card. 
  • A Nonworking HR Calendar Code needs to be in place in the Altus HR Setup card.

Configuring Cause of Absence

Causes of Absence need to be configured to be used in Employee Scheduling in a certain way.

  1. For each Cause of Absence that is to be used by scheduled and regular employees for entry, a separate code needs to be created to allow different behavior when entries are made in Absence Requests.
  2. Employee Scheduling can work only with Causes of Absence with Calculation Type Hour.
  3. Under the Scheduling Group on the Cause of Absence page, you need to check Use Schedule Quantity to indicate that this code will be used for scheduled employees.
  4. This action will automatically check Hide Quantity and Show Start and End Time.
    Note: This cause of absence cannot have values in Allow Neg. Entries - Employee, Allow Neg. Entries - Manager, and Payroll Control Code.

For full information of how to configure causes of absence you can read the following article: Creating the Causes of Absence.

Adding the Cause of Absence Activities

The link between Absence Management and Employee Scheduling is established on the unavailable unit for each area. The unavailable unit(s) must have an activity designated for each cause of absence that is configured to integrate with Employee Scheduling.

  1. Under Schedule Units, select the desired unavailable unit, then from the Navigate tab.
  2. From the Ribbon, select Activities.
  3. The Schedule Unit Activities card will open. Create a new activity row and select the Cause of Absence field.
  4. Choose a value from the drop-down list.
    Note: You may need to scroll horizontally to the extreme right to find the Cause of Absence field.
    Note: Only the designated unavailable unit(s) have this field in the Activity table.
  5. You must also set the Payroll Control Code for this line, as it will be used for the absent shift.
  6. All other fields on the activity record are optional, but it is best practice to set up the dimensions on the activity line, so that the correct cost centers are charged.

How it Works

When absence requests are approved, they will update Employee Scheduling if the selected cause of absence reason code is linked to Employee Scheduling on the attendance plan line. For each scheduled shift within the absence period, an absence shift is created for the employee and a matching vacant shift is created in the unit. The duration of the absence shift(s) will be used to update the employee's attendance totals.

If an absence request is deleted or canceled, if the absence shift has not already been transferred to payroll, then absence shift will be deleted. If it has not been filled or deleted, the corresponding vacant shift will be removed.

When shifts are created from a schedule template, they will automatically be turned into an absence/vacant shift pair for each shift that corresponds to a scheduled the absence period.

Make Vacant

When an employee's shift is made vacant, an absence shift is created for the employee and a matching vacant shift is created in the unit.

  1. If you select Mark Absent and then a cause of absence to be used in Employee Scheduling, Make Vacant will make the original shift absent.
  2. Create a matching vacant shift and a new absence request for the duration of the shift.

Troubleshooting

  • If the "Update Scheduling" operation on the Training Registration card reports that "Schedule Area No. must have a value..." then that field needs to be set on the Employee Time Attendance card for the indicated employee(s). See Prerequisites above.
  • If the "Update Scheduling" operation on the Training Registration card reports that "There is no Schedule Unit Activity within the filter..." then the Unavailable unit for the Area does not have a Training Activity configured. See Adding a training activity above.
  • If the "Update Scheduling" operation on the Training Registration card reports that "The field Payroll Control Code of table Schedule Unit Line Shift Activity contains a value...that cannot be found in the related table..." then the Training Activity does not have a payroll control code. See Adding a training activity above.
    Note: You will only encounter this error when the integration needs to create a vacant shift, that is, when an existing employee shift is in conflict with the training opportunity.
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