Management of vacation leave is often thought of as keeping people’s leave entitlement balances and history of usage with staff coming over to the HR person/team to identify what balance they have left. However probably the most time consuming part in leave management is staff filling in leave application forms, getting them submitted to managers who then need to check who else has applied for that date, authorising and shuffling all the papers, and providing the feedback to the employee of the status of their request.
Companies that provide a web-based leave system to their employees empower their staff with self-service abilities to check their leave balances and history, apply on-line for their leave from the comfort of their home, offices etc and receive notifications via e-mail and/or SMS when their leave gets approved or rejected.
Manager’s needing to approve leave have a clear vision of who is already planned to be away from the office within their department safe in the knowledge that the requests have been processed in the order received and everything is audited and fair. Managers can then take informed decisions as to when to approve leave requests and they have the ability to confirm leave decisions from any location over the web including via their Smartphones. When manager’s are away from the office, they can still form part of the approval chain or have automated delegation of leave approvals to their deputies.
The Shireburn Payroll System (SPS) from local software leaders, Shireburn Software’s, has a specific leave management module which provides this type of functionality and has been found to be very beneficial for companies of all sizes. This web-based module has been implemented both in small companies with 10-15 staff all the way to companies with hundreds of staff members providing very rapid returns on investment.
Shireburn Software’s web-based leave management system is able to be hosted in the cloud or on a company’s own site, with user’s accessing the module directly through their own company’s web site. The secure hosting of the leave manager out in the cloud is an increasingly attractive option. Shireburn offers 24x7 cloud-based hosting, licensing and support all rolled into one fixed quarterly fee. This avoids having to implement additional hardware resources, web site infrastructure, 24x7 availability and bandwidth etc and comes at a very cost effective price.
Staff members are easily able to look ahead when booking their leave to see who else in their department has applied for leave. The module’s out-of-office functionality also allows people to record that they are expected to be out of the office on particular dates for training, exhibitions & seminars or travelling etc, allowing staff and managers to be aware of the available resources on specific days when applying for or authorising leaving. Staff who have reported sick are also recorded in the system allowing their colleagues to know who is not available on that day.
In addition to bringing higher levels of efficiency to the leave approval process, including the payroll team and the managers, implementation of the Shireburn Leave management module ensures that the rest of the staff are better informed with who is on leave, out of the office or sick, thus improving their own performance.
Of course, the data from the Leave Management module is fully integrated with the Shireburn Payroll System ensuring no duplication of data maintenance is required or leave records updated.
Improve your leave approvals process and bring higher levels of efficiency to your payroll processes. For more details call 2131 9977 or access www.shireburn.com