Absence Entry, Approval, and Self Service Features

Depending on how you set up the approvals framework, self service features may be available to employees and managers to enter, review, and, in the case of managers, approve absence transactions. Additionally, payroll or absence administrators can enter, modify, review and approve absence transactions through Absence Management pages.

• Absence entry.

  To record actual absences into the system, users select the take element that identifies the absence and enter the dates of the absence. An absence reason can also be entered to further identify the cause of the absence (if you have defined absence reasons codes). Depending on your take rules, you can require online approval of absence entries before processing. If online forecasting is required for a take element, the system issues a warning when users try to save absence entries without first running the online forecasting process. Payees and managers can enter requests for absences through a web browser and view requests.

  Users can enter full or partial day absences so that when a payee is out for the same number of hours during each day of an absence event, the user enters the hours only once or selects the Half Day check box, if appropriate.

  Self service users can enter information in as many as 4 configurable fields when they enter absence events. This information updates the daily data when you run the Take process and can be available to your absence formulas. If you use this feature, we recommend that you provide users with guidelines for the types of data that they can enter.

  Note:

  If you define rules for self-service absence transactions, employees, managers, or both can use the self service pages to enter requests for absences. You can also define rules for approving self-service absence requests. Requests entered through the self service pages are treated as actual absences once they are approved.

• Absence entitlement balance forecasting.

  You can require the use of online absence entitlement balance forecasting during absence entry, or make its use optional. Managers can approve requests for absences and forecast absence entitlement balances as of a particular date. With forecasting, a user enters actual or planned absence events and launches an online process that processes future periods of time, starting with the last finalized calendar. It can return values for balances and other items that you define. You might use this feature, for example, to determine whether a payee has or will have enough entitlement to cover an absence.

• Balance inquiry.

  Use this feature to display a payee’s current entitlement balance. The online process displays the current entitlement balance and can be used to project entitlement for a take element as of the date that you specify.

• Delegate absence self service transactions.

  Delegation is when a person authorizes another to serve as his or her representative for a particular task of responsibility. Users can authorize other users to perform managerial tasks on their behalf by delegating authority to initiate or approve managerial transactions.