Our aim is to make the workflow more flexible and easier for everyone involved during the transition into the new year.

Tasks during the transition period

The following preparations are required at the end of the financial year for accounts with full-time and part-time employees:

• Update public holidays for the new year

• Carry over the remaining vacation balances to the new period

• Activate the time tracking for the new year

Until now the carry-over transaction had to be done on the last day of the year-end closing period (Dec 31 or March30th) so that no interruptions occur for your team's time tracking, which in turn put great pressure on the account administrator to review and finalize the vacation bank at that point in time.

Workflow optimizations

With our latest release these tasks are made more flexible with the following measures:

• The time tracking for the new year is automatically activated (floating periods). There are no interruptions ensuring continuous time tracking by your users.

• The carryover now takes into account any vacation days submitted for the new year. This means that the carry-over transaction can be carried out by the account administrator in the course of the new year (e.g. January, April) without time pressure.

• The holidays are transferred to the app on the fly. The new holidays can be set up at any time in the current year and are transferred to the member app's calendar.

The vacation bank from a user perspective

During the year-end transition, your members can now submit their vacation days and absences for the following year. For example, in 2020, the member app enables selecting and submitting vacation leaves for the year 2021 (previously the calendar was disabled for the following year). This option relieves the year-end closing process and ensures a correctly delimited vacation bank transfer, as shown below:

In the example above, the administrator carries out an annual carry-forward with a remaining balance of two vacation days (Fig. 1) and a vacation day submitted for the following year (Fig. 2). This annual carryover in Figure 3 results in an updated vacation bank including the vacation drawn before the carryover.

Updating public holidays

Your members see a yellow icon which indicates the new holidays ready for loading. In the public holidays page, any further holidays added by the account administrator can be pulled in with the swipe-down gesture, as shown:

Find out more about managing public holidays here.

With these improvements Staff Times takes the pressure off the account administrator during the transition period and ensures continuous complete and accurate time tracking with a clean vacation bank carry-over.