Annual leave is just one scenario people ask about. There are also other similar scenarios:
- Sally would have a new baby in May, so she might only work part time after that - Tuesdays and Thursdays after 1:30 PM
- Ben works in Perth but our main office is in Sydney, so we shouldn’t assign anything to him before 10:00 AM - which is 7:00 AM his time
- Every Friday afternoon we have regular team meetings, so nothing should be planned at that time, EVER!
In general, what you would want to do is to block out a certain period of time (or dates) so that the admin person assigning visits wouldn’t accidentally assign a visit to the wrong person, at the wrong time. To be completely honest, although we’re aware that this is a common scenario, we don’t have a specific feature for it yet, so using visits would be the closest solution:
Monthly “Leave” jobs
This applies to sick leaves, doctor appointments, volunteering at kids’ school, or anything else that’s not regular. Every month, you can create a job specifically for personal leaves. Every time someone has an unavailable period, add a visit to it and name it correspondingly. Doing this would give you a few benefits:
- You can achieve the wanted result - blocked out time on Schedule
- You can have an overview for all personal leaves for a certain month in one place
- Visit information can be exported in CSV, which makes it easier for reporting purposes
Recurring "Meeting” jobs
This applies to everything that’s regular - meetings, timezone differences, part-time shifts etc. Assume that you have a part-time contractor named Tom, who only work on Mondays and Fridays. Make a Job Template named “Tom’s non-shift hours” or something similar. Make it repeat weekly on Tue, Wed and Thu, without an end date. This way, whenever someone tries to assign a Thursday visit to Tom, “Unavailable” alert would show up. Benefits of doing this:
- You can achieve the wanted result
- You only need to do it once for every user