Changes in your team's availability are expected when managing work time. Having accurate information about each team member's available work hours is crucial for good resource planning and allocation.
By using the time off feature in the Calendar and Timesheet view, your team can decrease or increase their available work hours, which helps the project, team, and traffic managers understand everyone's actual availability and get the project timelines and deadlines right.
This article will show you how to manage time-off permissions, create, modify, and delete time-off and extra availability entries, and sync time-off data from Google Calendar and BambooHR.
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1. Managing time-off permissions
The time-off functionality is enabled by default; all users can add and modify their time off.
Your site administrator can control the time-off permissions for each permission set under Settings > Administration > Permission sets as follows:
- To let users add and modify their own time-off entries, tick the Add and modify time off checkbox.
- To let users add and modify time-off entries for other users, tick both the Add and modify time off and Manage time off for other people checkboxes.
2. Adding time off
Note! In this section, we'll show how to add a time-off entry in the Calendar view as an example, but it works the same way in the Timesheet view.
To create a time off request, go to the Calendar view and click the Time off button.
Select the relevant time-off type - these types are currently available:
- Vacation
- Medical leave
- Parental leave
- Study leave
- Other time off
- Extra availability
There’s also an Extra availability type for adding extra work hours for the selected time period - learn more about it in the next section.
If you've selected the Other time off type, an optional additional Reason field will appear, and you can specify the time-off type in free form there.
Select the time off start and end dates and duration. For the duration, you can choose between two options:
- All day - sets your availability to 0 for all the days within this period
- No. of hours - lets you specify how many hours you'll be unavailable each day; those hours are deducted from your default availability accordingly
For example, if your default availability is 8 hours and you set your time off duration to 3 hours per day, your daily availability will be reduced to 5 hours within this period.
Learn more about the default availability in our Availability settings article.
If you have permission to manage time off for other people, you will see the users dropdown field. If you've already filtered out certain users in your Calendar view, they'll be ticked by default, but you can click on the field to select any other users as needed.
Click Save to confirm and save the time-off entry for the selected users.
3. Adding extra availability
The Time off feature can also be used to increase their available work hours for a certain period of time.
For example, if you usually have Fridays free, but you're working one Friday as an exception. For this, select the Extra availability type. If needed, you can provide additional information in the Reason field.
Then, select the start and end dates for the period during which you will have the extra hours and enter the extra daily hours.
4. Viewing time-off entries
The added time off and extra availability entries affect the users' default availability. It is updated across all views in Scoro, such as the Calendar, the Planner, the Booking tool, etc.
In the Calendar view, you'll see a yellow time off icon when one or more users have time off that day or a blue clock icon when someone has extra work hours. When both types of entries are added, the yellow icon is shown.
Click on the icons for more details on the specific time off or extra availability entries.
You'll see the same time off and extra availability icons in the Timesheet view.
In the Planner view, the reduced capacity is indicated by a dark grey-striped background.
In the example below, Samantha normally works 8 hours a day. She has the whole day off on Thursday and Friday; therefore, these days are greyed out and don't show any available hours. On Tuesday, she has taken 5 hours off work, which means her total availability for the day is 3 hours.
Extra availability is added on top of the default availability. In the example below, John—who normally works 8 hours daily—has added two extra hours on Tuesday, thus increasing his capacity to 10 hours that day.
Time off is also visible in the booking tool in the Bookings module and the Bookings tab in the project detailed view:
- A yellow corner indicates that the user has taken time off during that time period.
- A violet corner means the user has extra availability.
Click on the colored corner to see more details of the entry.
5. Modifying a time-off entry
You can modify the time-off entries in the Calendar and Timesheet views if you have the relevant modification permissions.
To modify an entry, click the pencil icon and make the necessary changes. The user's availability will be updated accordingly.
To delete an entry, click the trash can icon and confirm your choice. This will reset the user's availability for the period.
6. Syncing time-off data from Google Calendar
Once you've connected Scoro with your Google Calendar, you can sync out-of-office events from your Google Calendar to Scoro. The out-of-office events sync doesn't create events in the Scoro Calendar—instead, it creates time-off entries, reducing your availability everywhere in Scoro.
You'll recognize the time-off entries coming from your Google Calendar by the calendar icon.
This is a one-way sync, meaning you can't modify the synced time-off entries in Scoro, but you can modify or delete your out-of-office events only in Google Calendar. Once modified or deleted there, the changes will be represented in Scoro.
Site administrators can also decide whether to enable or disable the out-of-office event syncing as time off globally for all site users or let them set their own preferences.
Learn more about time off in Scoro and how the sync settings can be managed globally by site admins and individually by each user.
7. Syncing time-off data from BambooHR
If your team manages time off requests and approvals in BambooHR, you can connect BambooHR with your Scoro site. This way, all approved time off is automatically synced to Scoro, ensuring a more accurate overview of everyone's actual availability.
You can recognize the synced time-off entries by the BambooHR logo.
This sync works one way - the approved time off requests can be edited and deleted only in BambooHR.
For more information, see our BambooHR integration article.