There are a lot of companies out there still relying on paper forms for their process of requesting and approving time off. Where time means money, these companies should consider moving to an electronic vacation request form. Firstly, companies should consider giving employees access to their own record to view their leave entitlement, time they have taken and how much time they have left via an employee self service. This makes less work for the HR Team and makes it a little easier for employees to request time off. Following that, you can put the entire vacation request process into an electronic format.

Giving your employees access to view their leave entitlements through your Time and Attendance System really cuts down on the calls your HR personnel receive about how much time they have left to take; but you can free up even more time by cutting out all the work that still has to be done in completing paper vacation request forms. You still have to organize and file all of those papers, consolidate each employee’s request with the time they have remaining to take, then look at a calendar to see if anyone else has booked that time off, and complete the paper form to approve or deny the vacation request. If you can’t accommodate the time the employee has requested, the employee goes through the whole process again for a different set of dates. Maybe you approve requests based on seniority date or on a first-come-first-serve basis; this means checking seniority dates and other scheduled vacation time as well. Vacation requests can become a very tedious process when done on paper.

Giving employees access to view their leave details via an employee self service can really help smooth out the process of leave requests, whether it be through Time & Attendance software, or even specific scheduling software.

Why not eliminate the hassles of dealing with paper forms, and switch to an electronic vacation request form? There is software available that is specifically designed for scheduling vacation requests, or you can look at the process of requesting and scheduling vacation within a Time and Attendance software. Consider the following as an alternative to paper forms.

An employee logs into the Employee Self Service and reviews how much time they have available for vacation. From there they can send a message to their supervisor asking for time off, which will indicate the dates they want off, what type of time off, the total hours or days they are requesting and any other specific details they want to include. Because the request is being sent through your Time and Attendance System, the supervisor will have the employee name, employee number, seniority date, position, and vacation entitlement details all within a click of their mouse to efficiently review the employee’s request. They can view the time off request directly in a calendar showing all of their employees’ requested and scheduled vacation so they can quickly determine if they can grant the employee’s request, or if they need to ask them to choose different dates. If they choose to approve the request, they do so directly in the Time Attendance Software leave calendar, and the employee is notified of the approval. If they cannot accommodate the time, they can remove it from the calendar and send the employee a message asking them to select a different date.

It just seems to make good sense –give your employees access to their leave through your Time and Attendance software, and consider taking the next step and using an electronic vacation request form as part of your leave request process. This will cut out the paper work and the time delay that comes with it for requesting time off. Plus, if you use Time & Attendance software for this, it means you do not need to manually enter time taken as it will already be in there.