An Absence Reason is the reason a Focus User gives to something happening. You may be prompted to provide an Absence Reason in several areas of Focus, including when editing clockings on a timesheet, booking an absence for an employee or when an employee makes an Absence Request.
It might be easier to think about them simply as Reasons, as they are not only used for Absences (e.g. someone forgets to clock in, their line manager manually enters the clocking and ‘Forgot to Clock’ is the Absence Reason given).
Name: Give the Absence Reason a name.
Colour: Give the Absence Reason a colour. You may find it useful to group similar absences by colour (i.e. sicknesses in red, holidays in blue), as this will help when it comes to viewing the Calendar and Availability screens.
Default Hours: When booking an absence, this is the standard amount of hours that will be allocated, unless manually adjusted at the time of booking.
Type: In simple terms, Absence Reasons can be seen as subcategories of Absence Types. Each Reason must be associated with a Type.
Calculation Type: Select one of the following options:
'Add To' - adds the selected hours to any hours worked that day
'Set To' - overwrites any hours worked during that day
'From Schedule' - takes the number of scheduled hours the employee was due to work
Default Rate: Defines which rate of pay to use when booking this absence.
Allow on Clocking: This Absence Reason can be selected when editing or adding an IN or OUT clocking on the Timesheet.
Allow on Absence Profile: This Absence Reason can be added to an Absence Profile.
Allow on Hours: This Absence Reason can be selected on an hours entry on a Timesheet, Calendar, Availability or Rota booking.
Allow Requests: Allows employees to specify this Absence Reason when booking time off from work using Self Service (assuming they have permission in their Self Service Profile).
Confidential: This Absence Reason will not be viewable to other employees when using the Availability screen in Self Service. Instead, it will simply show as 'Unavailable'. This can be useful if the reason is of a sensitive nature.
Contributes to Holiday Entitlement: When the Absence Reason is actually considered part of an employee’s work (e.g. ’Forgot to Clock’ or ‘Company Service’).
Default to Spend Lieu: Automatically ticks the Spend Lieu box when making an absence request/booking. In turn, this uses any lieu that has been accrued first before using annual leave.
Excluded Day for Working Time Directive: An Excluded Day, for the purpose of the Working Time Regulations, is a day when the employee is not working. As such, the day is not included in any report that tracks how much an employee has worked. For example, holidays and sickness reasons would be excluded days, but Company Service would not.
Mandatory Comment on Edit: The user must provide a comment when making an edit.
Use Shift Rule Rate if available: Attempts to select the same rate as used for Employee’s Default Shift Rule.
Select the rates that this Absence Reason is allowed to be booked against. Additional information
If you wish to turn off the function of providing an Absence Reason when making edits, navigate to System>System Setting>General>Edits and tick the option ‘Allow No Reason on Clocking Edits’.
Use Absence Profiles to assign the same set of Absences (Bank Holidays, Company Shutdown etc) to groups of employees.
Shift Rules are the building blocks of your team schedule - learn how to harness their power.
Cost Centres can be used to keep track of wage spending, assigning employee time to particular departments, projects or processes.
