Handling Absences in Silverbucket
Choosing the best approach for absences in Silverbucket depends on a few things:
- How long is the absence?
- Is it just a few weeks, a few months or perhaps 6+ months?
- Are you utilizing Silverbucket's Timesheet to track your flextime values?
- If you do, the correct flextime calculations need to be considered as well
- Silverbucket tracks the hours based on person's workday length
- Or is the person simply doing reduced hours such as 60% or 80% workweeks?
Absence Projects
Absence projects are the best way to handle shorter absences in Silverbucket. If the absence is less than 6 months, resourcing that person 100% for an absence project for that period of time is the way to go. When you set the project's type as 'Absence', the resourcing slots have a bolded borderline to indicate the person's absence.
The person's capacity remains the same but we are using all of it on the absence project.
Admin Absence
Admins can also set people absent in the admin panel . When the absence is set, Silverbucket will show grey color for the time period the person is marked as absent:
When using the admin absence, we are diminishing that person's capacity to 0% for that period of time.
Reduced Workweek (60%, 80% workweeks etc)
If the person is doing less work than usual for a certain period of time, you have two options:
A) Reduce the person's workday length to the new, correct value
This one is the most practical approach as afterwards you can resource the person with the relative values more easily and you don't need to always resource that person for the absence project separately. For example if a person had 8 hour workday length before and that person is doing only 60% of that for a longer / an unspecified period of time, you can reduce the person's workday length to 8 * 0,6 = 4,8 hours.
NOTE: If you are using Silverbucket's Timesheet & are tracking the flextime balances in Silverbucket, you should not perform this change. Instead, you can send an email to support@silverbucket.com and write down this following information:
- Whose workday length should be adjusted?
- What is the date when the new workday length comes into effect?
With this information we can adjust the flextimes correctly for the person; if Silverbucket Support is not involved, the flextime balances will be off: the software assumes that the person has worked with the new workday length since the beginning of time which skews the numbers.
B) Resource the person for an absence project with the relative value
You can also do the same absence project approach here: simply resource the person for the specified period of time on an absence project. This way, the person's capacity is tied into the absence project and can not be used for other projects.
NOTE: If you are using Silverbucket's Timesheet & are tracking the flextime balances in Silverbucket, that person should also register the actual hours for the absence project to make sure the flextime balances are correct.