LeaveWizard's Blog

Holiday Planner

2013-05-21T09:07:00.000+01:00

Handle your employees’ schedules and give holiday’s leave to keep them satisfied and hard working. Create and organize a holiday planner only with Leave Wizard. Handle holidays properly.These web tool allows your employees to mail request of holiday leave while managers automatically receives notification and simply log in to Leave Wizard holiday planer and organize the schedule. It avoids spending and clashing other leave and schedules by simply organizing and authorizing requests in just a click of a button.

Unlike using simple paper or spreadsheet program to organize schedules and leave for the holidays that might confuse busy managers and create mistakes and clashing schedules that may not be productive and cost effective for the company, Leave Wizard holiday planner web tool just simply connects and integrates itself to the company’s calendar and holiday schedule. It gives busy managers to handle each employee’s schedules and holiday leave requests better and easier that will make the company and employees happy, effective and satisfied.

This is web based software perfect for busy managers that can be confused by too much work and clashing schedules. It gives you a wider view of each schedule. Perfectly cost effective, simple to use and productive for the company.

Leave Wizard The Most Powerful Online Staff Leave Planner

2013-05-17T14:36:00.001+01:00

With every day is a busy day and handling your business while going to meetings and other works, becoming a manager is quite a hard job especially handling your employees’ schedules and work shifts adding up to that are their leaves and absences.

These are some common problems that busy managers must handle as a manager.Well, you can make it easier and better by using Leave Wizard, the most powerful online staff leave planner.

Leave Wizard is an online web-based software that helps and assist busy managers to handle his employees schedules easier while maintaining the company’s or the business’ productivity.

It integrates with your company’s calendar to you won’t need to create a new one while also allowing you to have a better wider view of your employees schedules.

Once somebody requests a leave, you will quickly receive a notification email and you can decide whether to approve it or not and you can also adjust the shifts and workload better. You can also have secondary approvers to make it easier if you have a bigger company. In addition, Leave Wizard is easy to use and understand. It has complete charts to see the work time each employee did, who took leaves and absences.

It’s all about context and visibility

2013-04-09T00:45:00.001+01:00

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

2013-02-01T23:19:00.001Z

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

2013-01-12T00:01:00.001Z

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

2012-10-27T00:17:00.001+01:00

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.

Free trial is here to stay but Free plan has to go.

2012-10-23T13:30:00.000+01:00

LeaveWizard will no longer be offering free accounts to new customers from our next release due by the end of October 2012. Existing free plan customers will be unaffected by this change.

We were able to offer a free of charge service for the last 3 years but now it’s time for a change. There are several reasons for this decision:

We wanted to offer free accounts initially hoping that organisations using the free service will be more likely to talk to us and provide us with feedback with regards to features and improvements in the system. Unfortunately despite our efforts and with the exception of a few individuals this has rarely been the case.

We were also hoping that the number of free accounts (and let’s face it - they are not free to provide) will stay relatively low therefore the need for additional support or hardware resources will be low. However the current status is that the number of free organisation accounts outnumbers the number of paid accounts therefore the share of support and hardware resources becomes a lot more significant.

Last but not least we offer the free plan as way for organisations to evaluate LeaveWizard. Since the introduction of our up to 3 months free trial with unrestricted number of users the take up has been promising and thus reducing the role of the free plan.

With all these reasons in mind we have decided to discontinue the free plan. From our next release any new customers with 5 or less users will need to pay a subscription fee which will be published on our website.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to get in touch via the contact form on our website – www.LeaveWizard.com

HR professionals wanted

2012-10-19T17:02:00.001+01:00

Are you an HR professional working for a small to mid size organisation?

We'd like to talk to you!

We are on a mission to help busy HR managers like you by making your job easier and more exciting.

If you'd like to help with our mission then email info@leavewizard.com for further details!

A better LeaveWizard

2012-09-12T23:15:00.001+01:00

September always brings a hint of colder weather and a reminder of the approaching winter. We’ve been preparing for a busy few months and next time you log in you will find an improved and easier LeaveWizard.

What has changed?

Set up wizard improvements

Earlier this year we introduced a new set up wizard to help with administrative tasks making easier a number of common functions throughout the system. Now we have made it even better and easier to use and manage even more. For full information about the improved set up wizard have a look at this article.

Culture specific dates

A number of you have asked for dates formatted to based on your specific date format. For example in Europe the most common format is dd/mm/yyyy while in US the preferred format is mm/dd/yyyy. We have implemented a fix that will select your preferred settings from your browser and will use them to display dates throughout the system.

In-context help

You will notice a little green question mark icon appearing in many places within LeaveWizard. This is our new in-context help. It provides you with extra information if you need it without taking too much space on the screen. It also lets us provide more details text than we would have if we were showing it at all times.

New dashboard for everyone

We have been experimenting with the new dashboard for a while now. The feedback we received was good and we introduced it as default for all new customers a few months ago. Since that was also positive we believe making it the only dashboard will be a positive change for everyone.

Layout of admin page

Now that every admin uses the new Dashboard with convenient links to common administrative functions and the set up wizard allows configuring most of the settings we re-ordered the functions on the Admin page – placing those not accessible via the dashboard at the top of the page.

As in every release we have also implemented a number of stability fixes, performance and usability improvements throughout the system.

We hope you will 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.

On the way to even simpler Leave Management

2012-08-22T22:59:00.001+01:00

We thought the summer is a good time of the year to start improving the LeaveWizard experience and make it even simpler and easy to work with. We have listened to your feedback, analysed the options and started the improvement process. You will see a series of releases over the next few months that will make our flexible and feature rich staff leave management system easier and more pleasant to work with. The first set of enhancements is outlined below:

Enhancement: Show Only Active is selected by default

We figured out that most of the time administrators would want to work with the active users and therefore showing only active by default looks like a more reasonable choice. If you still want to see your inactive users simply un-tick the checkbox at the top of the list and all users will be listed. You may then sort by the Active? column to quickly see your inactive users.

Enhancement: Year drop down now shows 5 years range

A few of our customers have asked to be able to see events beyond the current year and the year before. So we have increased the range that we show from 3 to 5 years. Now through out the system all year drop downs will show years from current year-2 to current year + 2.

Enhancement: Default visibility for Absence type is Admin

When you create a new type of type Absence it turns out usually the intention is to not show this information to everyone. Therefore we made the default setting to be visible to Administrators only.

Enhancement: Improved wording for base leave type names

We realised the names of the base type for leave types are causing some confusion so we decided to give them more appropriate names. They are also explained in detail in a help article here - http://help.leavewizard.com/2009/10/company-event-types.html

Other: Small changes and fixes

There are new and nicer wizard navigation buttons
Added a link to BusinessLink entitlement calculator on the allowance page
Default Workgroup name is now ‘Everyone’
Several stability and performance issues to improve your experience

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.

Are you ready for the Olympics?

2012-07-26T23:21:00.001+01:00

So you’ve seen the torch (some of us twice!) and you have bought all the necessary souvenirs and t-shirts and if you’ve been lucky enough you may even have tickets for some of the events. And you can’t wait for the games to begin.

Or may be you’re not interested in sports at all in which case I am sure you will find other ways to enjoy the (finally!) summer weather. If you’re in the country of the Olympic games that is.

The holiday season, the good weather, the new family members all contributed to having little to shout about in the past two months but now we have made enough improvements to LeaveWizard to warrant a blog post. Although many of these improvements are too small to mention I am sure our regular users will spot some nice touches throughout the application as well as a number of stability and performance improvements.

New Feature: Up to 3 months Free trial

New customers who register from now on will benefit from 1 month free trial which can be extended to up to 3 months. While this one is mainly for the benefit of new customers whilst developing the feature we managed to improve a number of things in the system related to registration, activation and set-up.

New Feature: Additional Info for employees

Administrators can now store additional information for every employee. This additional information is also listed in the list of team members so it is easily accessible.

Other issues addressed

Bug: printing from Leave Charts
Bug: It was possible to deactivate a workgroup that is in use
Multiple other fixes and many enhancements to improve your experience – as mentioned earlier we have made many small changes throughout the system ranging from small text changes to UI and performance improvements

We hope you find the new release useful and if you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.

Please do tell 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.

It must be the time of year for it!

2012-05-03T23:03:00.001+01:00

Wow, what a time it has been for us here at LeaveWizard. Both myself and Plamen have had a new arrival into our families – Plamen has a new son called Christopher and I have new daughter called Isabelle. Needless to say we’ve been a bit busy lately but we’re still delivering great new features, here is what we’ve got for you this month:

New Feature: Location based calendars

Does your company have more than one location? If so this one is for you. We’ve added a capability to add calendar events that are specific to locations which means you can define public or company events that are specific to locations within your organisation. Read more about it in this article: http://leavewizardonlinehelp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/location-specific-public-holidays.html.

Enhancement: Multi-edit enabled in allowance list

We’ve added the capability to multi-edit your allowance lists which should make managing your team member allowances even easier than before.

Enhancement: Request overtime defaults to “In hours”

If you’ve configured your application to allow overtime requests and your holiday is recorded in hours, when your team members request overtime we’ll automatically default to selecting the “in hours” option.

Enhancement: Improved quick links

A small tweak but good stuff all the same, this change sees some improvement in the quick link menu by taking you to the setup wizard pages instead of the administration pages.

Enhancement: Less movement in the site

This one might have niggled at you just a little bit – so we listened and fixed it. When you hovered over the menu’s you would find the menu moved about a bit, so this month we’ve made the site a bit less wobbly.

Enhancement: Independent page sizes

We used to have a “one page size rules them all” rule but you’ll be pleased to know this has now gone away. You can now change page sizes for different areas of the site independently of each other.

Enhancement: General website speed improvements

We’ve put some work into making sure our website is more performant by caching more of the web stuff locally.

Other issues addressed

Bug: requesting leave on a bank holiday would leave a 0.5 day duration
Bug: when team restricted visibility is turned on line managers could not see the leave of employees they approve leave for

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.

Please do tell 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.

Spring is in the air and the Easter holidays are looming

2012-03-07T23:40:00.001Z

The mornings are getting brighter, the days are getting longer and LeaveWizard is delivering more great features to make your leave management simpler than ever before.

This month we’ve focused on trying to streamline and simplify the setup process as we found that although LeaveWizard provides a very flexible way to manage your leave and absence it was not always immediately obvious. So we’ve introduced a new set up wizard that will really help to get the basic configuration options sorted.

New Feature – Simplified Setup Wizard

The idea behind the wizard is to capture the essential options required to configure LeaveWizard for use within your organisation in a few simple steps.

The wizard consists of 6 steps including setting up of your organisation and users, creating your approval structure, configuring your leave types and employee allowances and creating any company or public holidays.

Take a look at the following article for more details about the set up wizard. We would really like to know your thoughts on this wizard so just drop us a line if you think we could improve it in anyway.

Other issues addressed

Opening the leave by month chart from within an approval request will now default to the department of the employee requesting the leave
When requesting over time, if there are any leave types configured in hours then the overtime request will default to be in hours
Fixed Bradford Factor recalculation issue

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.

Please do tell 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.

Some great winter warmers

2012-02-06T23:49:00.001Z

Well the cold snap certainly seems to have kicked in but this month sees a release that contains some great new functionality and enhancements to help warm your chilled bones.

Enhancement – Allowance inclusive of bank holidays and company leave

As we all know one of the big topics in leave management is an employee asking “how much leave do I have left?” and with LeaveWizard we’ve made answering that question as simple as possible. But depending on the stated level of holiday within an employees contract you may want to represent that same value in LeaveWizard and now you can.

Previously, for example, an employees holiday allowance was the total number of days available for holiday and did not include bank holidays or company leave days but now is possible to choose which types of company leave should be included in an allowance.

Enhancement – Work patterns that ignore bank holidays

Everyone works in a different way and although the majority of us do not work on bank holidays some of us do. To help make requesting leave for these bank holiday workers easier we’ve extended the work pattern functionality to allow indicating that the work pattern should ignore bank holidays. This means that when an employee requests a holiday that goes over a bank holiday and they are on a work pattern that ignores bank holidays the bank holiday day would reduce their allowance accordingly.

Enhancement – Work pattern days can now be marked as a “half day”

Some work patterns, especially part time ones can include half days in the middle or probably more commonly on Saturdays, until now the only way to support this within LeaveWizard was by using an hour based holiday allowance but now you can simply mark the work pattern day as a half day – when an employee books that day only a half day allowance will be taken.

Enhancement – Overtime requests extended with pay rate

It is now possible to specify the pay rate of an overtime request. We’ve added the ability to choose the required pay rate when requesting overtime allowing the payroll department to more easily calculate the total number of hours that should be paid for.

Enhancement – Position and Reference fields added to employee details

Another helpful addition for the payroll department is the inclusion of a Position and Reference field to an employees record, these are simply free text fields in which you can specify some additional useful information. The fields have also been included in the export to CSV feature of the leave request list, leave report and overtime request list.

Enhancement – Employee Allowances and Work Patterns now have a multi-edit feature

This is a relatively small modification but provides great productivity savings, it is now possible to perform a multi-edit of all allowances and all work pattern days in a list at one time. This enhancement drastically reduces the number of clicks required to configure employees leave and work patterns.

Other issues addressed

It is possible to have no default work pattern
When editing workgroups it was possible to save a team leader from one workgroup as the team leader from another
When performing a bulk upload new workgroups would be duplicated if more than one new employee was added

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.

Please do tell 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.

Christmas treats from your favorite staff holiday planner

2011-12-22T08:32:00.001Z

It has been a busy couple of months in the build up to the Christmas holidays with lots of new registrations and holiday bookings being made. We've also been busy building some great new features including an improved dashboard and approver setup.

Enhancement: New User Dashboard

The old LeaveWizard dashboard was very "Inbox" centric and for those that did not manage their inbox very often when they logged into LeaveWizard all they would see was a wall messages and users had to scroll and click a few tabs in order to see the information that they really wanted.

The new dashboard addresses each of these issues by simplifying the user workspace in the following ways:

Easier access to allowance details
More intuitive positioning of command options such as request leave and leave charts
Reduced number of inbox messages displayed
Reduced number of approval messages displayed
Addition of quick links for administrators to get to the tasks they need to do quicker
Addition of a Reports tab on the menu bar for administrators to get quicker access to reports

Although we've made these changes to the user dashboard to make using LeaveWizard even easier we are conscious that not everybody likes immediate change. So this month with have introduced a new feature notification mechanism which allows all of our users to choose whether they want to use the new feature or not.

When you first login you will see the notification bar which looks something like this:

As you can see you now have the option to "Try it out", clicking this link will turn on the new feature temporarily for your current login session. The "Tell me more" link will take you to a help article that explains the new feature. Clicking the "Hide" link will hide the notification for the duration of your current logged in session.

After clicking the "Try it out" link the new dashboard will be loaded. The first thing you may notice is the notification bar at the top of the screen. This allows you to either confirm that you would like to set the new dashboard as your default or you can revert back to the old version if you don't like the new one.

We would really love to you to tell us what you think about the new dashboard to see how we could make it even better.

Enhancement: New Approval Tree

Lets be honest, setting up approvers in LeaveWizard was functional but not entirely intuitive or easy. This release brings massive improvements to this with the introduction of the new approval tree which visualizes the company approval structure.

You can instantly see who is not currently approved by anybody and then simply drag and drop the required employees onto their respective approver to make them approver for all leave types or drag them onto the specific leave type to assign them just for that type.

We have also added easy access to some of the key approval related features such as having team leaders as default approvers, using team restricted leave visibility and whether administrators require approval for their leave requests.

Enhancement: Add workgroups and work patterns on Team Member Details

We've streamlined the add team member process by providing functionality to add new work groups and work patterns whilst you entering team member details so that you can create them on the fly.

Enhancement: More organized administration page

A simple change that might make a big difference is the breaking up of the administration page into smaller categories to help you navigate the many options that LeaveWizard offers.

Additional changes

We've made some other more minor changes such as:

Work patterns can only be extended or reduced by 7 days
Improved performance of page rendering throughout the system

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.

Please do tell 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.

Gunpowder, treason and some enhancements

2011-11-02T23:41:00.001Z

Well to be fair this month there is a lack of both gunpowder and treason but there are a few enhancements worthy of note.

This month we’ve focused on ironing out a few issues in the system:

Enhancement: Request Overtime for others

We recently introduced the functionality to request overtime and for that overtime to be approved by an administrator. However, there was a restriction where only the employee requiring the overtime could request it. We’ve enhanced this feature to allow administrators to request overtime on behalf of other team members.

Enhancement: My Leave By Year shows current leave year

We’ve modified the My Leave By Year chart so that instead of showing todays date and the next 12 months, it now shows leave from the start of the current user’s leave start date.

Enhancement: Display creation time on leave requests

This is a simple but useful change which now displays the time that an event was created allowing those “I submitted my request first” issues to be resolved nice and quickly.

Bug fixes:

The following bug fixes have been addressed in this release:

Cannot create a new work pattern day
Null reference exception can occur whilst submitting hour based leave
An error could occur during Event Approvals when two users accessed the same time
Submitting a leave request for someone else could use the wrong work pattern
Has enough allowance validation is not firing correctly allowing leave to be submitted when no allowance is available

Other Stuff:

We’ve also been looking into how we can improve the user interface and make the system more intuitive but this isn’t quite ready yet. If you have any suggestions on how we might be able to make the system more easy to use please let us know and we shall do our best to include your suggestions.

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com.

If you would like to give us some suggestions on how we can improve LeaveWizard then please go to our feedback forum http://leavewizard.uservoice.com 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.

Login without a passwords

2011-10-06T00:40:00.000+01:00

This month brings us a great feature – integration of Open Id authentication. What on earth is that I hear you say? Well in simple terms it means that LeaveWizard has joined the millions of different websites that allow you to sign in without having to create a password. Apart from that we also have some great enhancements so read on to find more.
New Feature: Open Id & Google integration

We’ve added Open Id integration which allows you to use other accounts (like Google) to log in to your LeaveWizard account. In the future we will add more Open Id integrations so you can use various trusted services to log-in and this will also allow LeaveWizard to be easily integrated within other systems. Take a look at this help article for more information http://leavewizardonlinehelp.blogspot.com/2011/10/login-using-your-google-account-or-open.html.
Enhancement: Individual accrue rates

Earlier this year we introduced the accrued allowances for event types. This is a nice feature letting you specify that leave allowances are accrued throughout the year. Initially we implemented only one accrue rate specified per event type and valid for all employees. This month as per customer's request we're adding the ability to specify accrue rates individually so your employees can accrue allowances at different rate.

Enhancement: Bradford factor for selected event types

Last month we implemented the Bradford factor and the initial implementation calculated the factor based on all absence. Thanks to your feedback we have now added the ability to specify which event types should be included in the calculation. You can read more about this feature in the updated help article.

Other changes to LeaveWizard

We have changed the layout of the “Login” page and the "My Settings" page to improve usability and make the most of the space on smaller resolution screens.

We added Public calendar templates for national holidays for the following countries and years:
The Netherlands (2013), USA (2012 & 2013), United Kingdom (2013), Hong Kong (2012)

And finally this release also includes several stability improvements across the system.

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com

If you would like to give us some suggestions on how we can improve LeaveWizard then please go to our feedback forum http://leavewizard.uservoice.com 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.

Rich & Plamen

The Bradford factor, new leave restriction groups and some more enhancements

2011-09-07T22:57:00.006+01:00

It is that time of the year when roads get suddenly busy again those of us lucky enough to have been on holiday are ready to come back to work loaded with new energy and enthusiasm. While there may be no need for most of us to go to school at the beginning of the school year it is certainly worth casting a look upon LeaveWizard’s new features in the latest release.

New Feature: The Bradford Factor

This is a feature that was requested some time ago through our feedback forum and over time it gathered votes so we decided to implement it this month. We appreciate that not everyone would like to use this calculated factor so like with most of LeaveWizard’s feature the Bradford Factor is optional and if you want to use it you will have to switch it on. For full details how to go about it take a look at this help article.

New Feature: Restrict the number of employees on leave at the same time from a given group of employees from different department

This is an extension to the already existing LeaveRestriction user group type which you can already use in LeaveWizard. The new bit is the ability to not just disallow the people in this group to be off at the same time but to also specify how many of them can be off at the same time. This can be particularly useful when there’s specific type of employees – those with administrator rights for LeaveWizard and if they are in different departments you could perhaps set-up a restriction group for them to guarantee that at any given day at least 2 of them are in the office. For full details about this feature check this help article.

New Feature: Hide users from the charts and lists

As requested by some of our customers we have added the ability to ‘hide’ someone from the lists and charts. While the employee is still active and able to request and approve leave and an administrator can see his/hers leave, etc. other employees and team managers will not be able to see any of these details. This could be useful in case you would like to ‘hide’ information for specific employees – e.g. company director.

Enhancement: Company email

When you register your LeaveWizard account you use an email address. We often use this to contact you when we need to get in touch or through regular communication if you’ve selected that you would like to receive our newsletters. So far you were unable to see and change this email once you’ve registered. We have added the ability to modify this email in case you have to change it for communication or other purposes. This can be done by administrators and is available on the company settings page.

Enhancement: Notify users when someone else requests leave for them

This enhancement means that if a team manager or administrator requests leave on behalf of an employee then the employee will be notified that this is the case. This is useful not just as notification but to also prevent any duplication of effort and ensure any mistakes are corrected early on.

Enhancement: Contact support from within the app

We’ve added a link from within LeaveWizard that allows you to email support in case you have questions or need help or simply want to suggest something. The contact us form will automatically fill in your details (except phone number) although you can still change the contact name and email later.

Other changes to LeaveWizard

As always apart from the new features and enhancements in this release we have also included several stability improvements across the system.

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com
If you would like to give us some suggestions on how we can improve LeaveWizard then please go to our feedback forum http://leavewizard.uservoice.com 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.

Rich & Plamen

Time Off in Lieu handling, UI improvements and more

2011-07-25T21:57:00.012+01:00

Why not take some well earned time off in lieu with your favourite staff holiday planner and while you are at it, enjoy our new easier and cleaner user interface. This month sees some important changes to LeaveWizard that we think you are going to like.

New Feature: Time Off In Lieu

Over the past few months we have received a number requests to implement time off in lieu booking within LeaveWizard and we are delighted to announce that we’re introducing this feature with our July 2011 release. The Time Off In Lieu (TOIL) implementation allows you to enable TOIL for any event type. As always the experience is simple and straightforward and if you would like to learn more about setting up TOIL for your organisation take a look at this help article: Time Off in Lieu handling with LeaveWizard.

Enhancement: User Interface changes

Earlier in July we published this article explaining our proposed User Interface (UI) changes after feedback we’ve received from a number of users about a couple of areas of LeaveWizard.

We listened to your feedback and made several improvements to the UI. These include better accessibility to actions and leave chart menus and more screen real estate so that more of the charts and lists are visible without scrolling.

We hope you like the new UI and hope it will make your leave management experience even easier.

Enhancement: Improvements to Accrued Allowances

This is another set of changes which we made based on your feedback. I would like to thank all those who emailed us with suggestions. The enhancements include: allowances are now recalculated immediately after enabling/disabling the “is accrued” flag and accrued types are now also available for hour based allowance types with the only restriction that “Use work days only” is enabled. If you would like to learn more about how to set up accrued allowances take a look at this article Accrued allowance for event types.

Other changes to LeaveWizard

We have changed the layout of the “Leave By Year” chart to ensure more of the annual calendar is visible without scrolling.

We also introduced performance improvements to page loading which should make browsing LeaveWizard faster.

And finally this release also includes several stability improvements across the system.

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com

Rich & Plamen

User Interface changes are coming soon

2011-07-04T23:19:00.001+01:00

We’re just putting the finishing touches on some changes to the current user interface and I wanted to give you a bit of a heads up before we release the changes in the next week or so.

Why are we changing the User Interface?

We had feedback from a number of users about a couple of areas of LeaveWizard. Although everyone agrees the system is simple and easy to use there were some areas that could do with some minor tweaking, so we have listened and made some changes that will hopefully make a big difference – we would be really interesting in hearing your thoughts on it.

What are we changing?

The general changes are summarised below:

Accessibility to actions and leave chart menus

The action and leave chart menu system at the top of the page was introduced the some time ago and it has served us well but there were definitely some drawbacks.

The main issue was that it was tricky to locate when you first access the system – because it hides the main functionality of requesting leave and viewing charts, until you hover over it. This meant that when users first accessed the system it was not immediately obvious what to do.

We felt that this was a pretty important thing to address so we’ve moved all of the available actions and leave chart links to a side bar on the right side of the screen:

In order to make these functions more accessible we had to create more screen real estate, I’ll explain a little more about what I mean by this in the next section.

Making more screen real estate

Screen real estate is the term used to represent the space available on the screen to layout the functions of the system. As you can see from the following screenshot the current LeaveWizard user interface has a lot of real estate taken up by the side bar on the left hand side of the screen and the title bar (containing the logo and action menu) actually takes up a considerable amount of space at the top of screen.

In this layout there is not really any room for the 6 actions that you can perform from the action and leave chart menus. To resolve this issue we decided to remove the “My Leave” sub links from the side bar menu and then change the orientation of the menu itself. The following image shows the new simplified horizontal menu bar.

As you can see we have split the menu into two parts, the first part provides access to the main parts of the LeaveWizard functionality and the second part provides access to administration and setting details. We did this so that there is a clear definition between the functionality and setup parts of the application as we have also modified their layouts in order to allow for more information to be shown on pages that require it.

By removing side bar from the administration, user settings and room booking screens we have freed up more real estate for the functions themselves so that the overall experience of configuring the system is better and there is more space for us to add information if necessary.

Summary

As you can see, we haven’t made large changes to the general look and feel but it is enough to make a difference – hopefully one for the good. As usual we would really love to hear what your thoughts are.

Rich

What’s new on 7th June 2011?

2011-06-07T20:33:00.001+01:00

This month we’ve focused on enhancing existing features to make your staff holiday planning tasks even easier than ever before.

Enhancement: Cover for Approvers

LeaveWizard has had the concept of selecting a cover employee for a while now but this month sees the an extension to this feature which provides for the scenario when an employees approver/line manager may be on holiday at the time they want to make a leave request.

If the approver/line manager chooses someone to cover their leave and that person is also a line manager or administrator then any leave requests that require approval will be automatically forwarded to the person providing cover.

If the person providing cover is not a line manager or administrator then the person requesting leave will be informed that their approver is currently on leave and their leave request will not be processed until they return and informs them that if they wish to have the leave approval processed they should speak with an administrator.

Enhancement: Accrued allowance for hour based event types

Last month saw the introduction of a new feature for automatically accrued allowances which simply requires you to set the number of work days required to accrue a single day of holiday and then LeaveWizard will calculate on a nightly basis the allowance that each employee should have according to their start date. This month we’ve extended the feature to allow the automatic calculation of accrued leave on holiday types that are recorded in hours.

Enhancement: Improved employee details page

We’ve modified the employee details page to make it a little more intuitive and more obvious how to add approvers to employees.

Enhancement: Individual work pattern highlighted in my leave by year

We’ve slightly modified the “My Leave By Year” chart to highlight your own personal work pattern so that you can more easily see which days are work days and which are non-work days.

Enhancement: Added colours to event type drop downs

When you are modifying company event details it is sometimes good to see what colour the event type is going to be, so we’ve modified the colour selection drop down list to show the colour of the event type.

Enhancement: Added search to employee drop downs

We’ve modified the employee search drop downs to allow you to start typing the name of the employee you are looking for and the drop down will pre-select the relevant employee name.

Bugs fixed:

This month we’ve fixed the follow issues:

Fixed inbox sort problem
Fixed OnLeaveToday not loading data correctly

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com

Features fit for a Royal couple

2011-05-04T00:00:00.001+01:00

This month’s release was slightly delayed due to the recent Royal wedding but with features like automatically accrued leave, leave visibility user groups and improved allowance configuration, we think they are well worth the wait.

New Feature – Accrued Leave Types

This useful new feature allows you to mark a leave type as being accrued. This means that it is now possible to set up leave types that automatically accrue leave for employees throughout the year starting from their start date. Simply configure the “Allowance” field as the number of days service required to gain a single holiday day and LeaveWizard will do the rest.

New allowances are calculated overnight. If required you can configure the accrual to only include working days. This means that the system will use the employees work pattern to determine how many working days they have completed since the anniversary of their start date.

New Feature – Leave Visibility User Groups

There are some times when it might be useful for users to see a leave chart for employees from different departments across the company. An example of this might be if the Director of a company approves leave for the upper management team, they may wish to see who is off at any one time. This feature introduces the ability to create a leave visibility user group in which users from various workgroups can be grouped together.

When viewing the Leave Chart, it is then possible to select the User Group you would like to view the chart for.

New Feature – Notify Admin on Approval

As an administrator there may well be times when you just want to know when an approval is made within the company. This simple setting on the “Administration | Event Type Details” page allows an administrator to configure whether they should be notified (via email) whenever a leave request has been approved within the system.

New Feature – Override Business Rules

We’ve introduced the ability for an administrator or line manager to override business rules such as “Has Enough Allowance” and “Employee Is Already On Leave”. If an employee attempts to request leave and they either do not have enough allowance or there is a leave restriction in place which means that another employee is already on leave for the required period they will be prevented from requesting the leave. However, this new feature means that a line manager or administrator can choose to manually override the business rule at their discretion.

Enhancement – Improved Configure Allowances

We’ve made viewing and configuring of allowances a whole lot easier. Instead of only showing allowances when they were different from the default allowance we now show all allowances for all staff members which provides a much more intuitive view of employees leave allowances.

This enhancement also introduces the ability to edit the allowance “inline” which means that you no longer have to navigate away from the page.

Enhancement – Improved Approver Setup

We’ve added some more useful tool tips to the approver setup page that now makes it even easier to configure your approvers. By simply hovering over either the team leader, approver or secondary approver employee names you will be presented with a list of the employees that they are a leader or they approve leave for.

When viewing the approver list we have also added a short cut feature that allows you to quickly create a leave visibility user group based upon the employees that the user approves leave for.

Bug Fixes

This months bug fixes include:

“Two Click” request some times does not leave Request Leave window open
Incorrect employee count is shown in the subscription upgrade message
Hour based leave cannot be requested for longer than 99 hours
Post back loading panel is not shown on the dashboard
Default workgroup could include inactive workgroups

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com

Minimise Royal Wedding Disruptions in the office

2011-04-10T20:20:00.011+01:00

Management Today have written an article giving their top ten tips on minimising office disruption during the Royal Wedding. They make some good points and provide some handy hints on the little things you can do to make your staff feel like they are treated fairly during a time when there are so many public holidays.

There are a number of tips that the author suggests which we believe LeaveWizard could really help any company achieve. These include communication, making it fair, writing it down and managing sick days.

Communication: communicating who is on leave and when is at the heart of what LeaveWizard stands for. With easy access to leave charts and integration with tools such as Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar sharing this important information could not be simpler.

Making it fair: LeaveWizard records exactly who requested which leave and when allowing managers to make easier decisions based upon a first come first served basis.

Writing it down: The article suggests that this is so that employees can take ownership of their annual leave and avoid conflicting requests. With LeaveWizard employees can take complete ownership of their leave and they can make a leave request in as little as 3 clicks. If there are any leave conflicts they will be immediately informed. If there are no conflicts their leave approver will be sent an email notifying them of the request. 1 click later the leave can be approved and the employee notified of the approval. LeaveWizard then stores all leave information safely and securely allowing other team members to see details of the leave in charts and calendars.

Manage Sick Days: LeaveWizard can also be used to record sick day information and allow managers or HR administrators to easily see patterns in sickness.

Here at LeaveWizard we believe that staff holiday management should be simple and easy for all employees, allowing them to focus on their day job rather than sorting out time off work.

Why not register for a free 5 user account and see whether LeaveWizard could help your organisation with your leave management.

It only takes Two Clicks

2011-03-28T23:23:00.007+01:00

This month we have added some exciting new features that add a little more extras on top of your simple staff leave management solution.

New feature – "Two Clicks" leave request

We have been asked a few times if it is possible to request leave straight from the calendar view and we added just that. Your can now request leave by clicking on the start and then end date of your leave on either "This Month" calendar from the dashboard or on the Leave By Year chart. You can still of course confirm your request with minimal effort as before. It cannot be easier to request leave so why not try this new feature today.

New feature – Employees can configure the default work group and period of Staff On Leave

Previously the Staff on leave was always showing the same default filters and every time you had to select the settings you needed. Now we have added a feature to configure these options so you don't have to keep selecting your preferred values from the drop downs. Simply go to My Settings and set your preferred "Staff On Leave" filters.

Enhancement – Warning is displayed when booking leave if company leave exists within the dates of the leave request

When requesting leave our duration calculation always skips any company events that may exist within the boundaries of your leave request so you never have to calculate yourself, however your asked us if we could make it a little more clear when such company events exist so we added a warning which shows at the top of the request leave form in case there is a company event between the start and end date of your leave. Don't worry too much if you see it though - it is just a warning and if your leave is around April it is probably because of the Royal Wedding!

New Enhancement - Allowance and Details visibility of event types are now configurable

This is in fact two features packed into one. We have changed event types so you are able to configure the visibility of allowances in case you don't want everyone to see that their unpaid allowance is 10 for example. And you can also change the visibility of the Details of each event of certain type. It is all very easy to do - just edit the event type you want to make changes to and select the roles from the drop downs to configure visibility.

Enhancement - Control which event types are published to calendars

You can now take control of which event types are published to external calendars such as MS Outlook and Google Calendar. Simply navigate to the event type you want to make changes to and tick or un-tick the “Publish” check box accordingly.

Bug Fixes:

This months bug fixes include:

IE 9 issue when requesting leave (Native mode only)
Issue with duration not calculating on leave request form
Problem with setting of default workgroup
Issue when adding and immediately removing employee approver

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com

One Giant Leap for LeaveWizard

2011-03-01T00:04:00.001Z

Managing staff holidays just got a whole lot quicker. The time has finally come for us to take the next big step on our journey but whilst we’ve been working on getting our payment systems up together we’ve also been working hard to improve the overall performance of LeaveWizard.

New Feature – Subscribe to a paid plan

This month’s release is an important milestone for LeaveWizard as it sees the introduction of our paid service which will enable us to invest more in scaling and infrastructure. This will also allow us to increase our development efforts whilst continuing to provide responsive support and keep improving LeaveWizard aggressively based on your feedback.

The following help articles have been created to give you all the information you need to transition into a paid plan:

As with everything we do here at LeaveWizard we’ve tried to make it as simple, easy and fair as possible but as always we’d love to get your feedback.

Enhancement – Performance improvements

We’ve been working hard to make LeaveWizard much more responsive and we hope that you will notice the difference. Some of the areas to check out include:

Login time is now significantly reduced
Inbox and message handling is now quicker
Approval processing takes less time
Leave Requests and Leave Report are now much much quicker
Address book loads faster
Leave Chart rendering speed has been improved
No of events in iCal feed has been reduced so that it returns 30 days in the past and 90 days in the future

We are committed to making LeaveWizard as fast and easy to use as possible so if you have any issue with performance just let us know and we’ll get right on it.

Enhancement – My Leave By Year contains chart legend

A relatively simple enhancement but important all the same, the My Leave By Year chart now shows the chart legend making it easy to identify the different types of leave you have taken through out the year.

Enhancement – Improved Work Pattern hints and workflow

We’ve slightly modified the “Add New Work Pattern” feature so that it has a few more hints to guide you through the process but also modified it so that you can only customise the work pattern after you have created it.

Bug Fixes:

iCal feed does not show as “All day” is MS Outlook
Cover employee is not being selected when editing an event.
When requesting leave for someone else an employee is selected but the event details are not available unless a different employee is selected
Events that do not start at 12am are not shown on the Leave Chart
Approving an already expired event can result in a “Unable to approve at this time” error message
Cancelling an already cancelled or expired event can result in a “Unable to cancel at this time” error message
Request Leave drop down menu is too big in Fire Fox

If you find any problems or have issues then please do not hesitate to contact the team here at LeaveWizard via email on support@leavewizard.com