Timebutler: Vacation Planning, Absences & Shift Planning

1. What the Online Vacation Planner Does

Timebutler's online vacation planner and absence management module handles vacation, sick leave, remote work, special leave, doctor's appointments, and any custom absence type the organization needs to track. Per Timebutler's marketing, every employee gets a vacation account with working days, approved vacation requests, entitlements, and contract-based settings - kept up to date automatically as requests are approved.

2. Absence Types - Customizable

Per Timebutler's Settings & Account and Vacation Planner pages:

• Custom absence types can be created with their own colors, abbreviations, and approval settings.
• Examples Timebutler explicitly names: vacation, sick leave, remote work, business trips, doctor's appointments, special leave.
• Annual limits can be set per absence type.
• Editing permissions and viewing rights can be configured per type.
• Custom fields can be added to capture the exact information needed per absence type - input types include text, date, yes/no, and others.

3. Request and Approval Workflow

• Submission: Employees submit absence requests with the relevant fields. Real-time vacation balance is shown to the employee before submission.
• Multi-stage approval workflows: The organization chooses how many supervisors must approve a request, who they are, and in what order.
• Inbox approval: Managers can review and approve time-off requests directly from their email inbox, with notifications sent to the right people.
• Document requests: Sensitive absence types can require documents (e.g., medical certificates) before approval.
• Automatic balance update: Once all approvals are in, the vacation balance updates automatically.

4. Detailed View per Time Entry

Per the Vacation Planner feature page, every time entry's detail view shows:

• Employee data
• Start and end, calendar days and working days (calculated automatically)
• Status and entered comment
• Information about the representative and their commitment
• Overlaps with entries from colleagues
• Vacation account summaries (for vacation requests)

Editing history is recorded for each entry - employees and managers have full access to who submitted, edited, rejected, or approved it.

5. Vacation Locks ("Holiday Bans and Warnings")

This is a named Timebutler feature: vacation locks can limit time-off requests during critical periods, for a specific department, location, or the whole company. If an employee requests vacation during a locked period, they receive a warning notification to postpone the request. Vacation locks can also display warnings to avoid understaffing during peak times without fully blocking requests.

6. Mass and Recurring Entries

• Time entries can be input for multiple employees simultaneously.
• Vacation requests for recurring holidays or absences can be set up once and applied repeatedly.

7. Vacation Balance & Rollover

Per the Pricing page and Vacation Planner page, the vacation planner supports:

• Up-to-date vacation balance per employee, including available days, pending and approved requests, public holidays, and contract-specific entitlements
• Automatic rollover (carryover) of vacation balances
• Real-time visibility for employees of their actual vacation balance

Specific carryover rules (caps, deadlines, accrual schedules) are configurable but their exact policy options are not enumerated on Timebutler's public marketing pages.

8. Calendar & List Views

• Calendar view: Visual overview of vacation and absence entries, with customizable filters.
• List view: The same data in tabular form for managers reviewing requests or sequences of updates.
• Color coding: Absence types are color-coded for visual clarity in the calendar.

9. Shift Planning

For organizations operating in shifts - retail, hospitality, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics - Timebutler includes a shift planning module. The workflow is: create → assign → publish.

Creating a shift

• Set a title, date, and time (creating a shift takes less than 30 seconds per the Shift Planning page).
• Optionally add a department and location - Timebutler then suggests the most relevant employees at the top of the selection list.
• Drafts can be updated or removed at any time before publishing.
• Copy the previous week or carry over individual days, then adjust what's changed.

Assigning employees

• Availability indicator shows whether the employee is free that day - time off booked, sick leave, or already assigned to another shift.
• Multiple employees can be assigned to a single shift, each with their own start and end times.
• Partial shifts are captured cleanly without workarounds.
• Breaks within a shift use split time blocks (e.g., 08:00–12:00 and 13:00–17:00).
• Night shifts crossing midnight are detected automatically and displayed across two days.

Publishing

• New shifts are visible only to managers by default - employees see nothing until publish.
• One click publishes the entire week.
• For current and future weeks, shifts can be unpublished and adjusted.
• Past weeks stay on record as an audit trail for documentation and compliance.

Delegated planning

• Shift planning can be delegated to team leads and managers.
• Each manager plans their own area - they see and edit only the shifts in their scope.
• Admins always have the full picture across the organization.

What's on the public roadmap (not yet shipped)

Per the Shift Planning page's "What's coming next" section, the following are planned but not currently available:

• Tighter connection between time tracking and shifts
• Multi-employee shift assignment in bulk
• Shift scheduling by employee qualification

Important: Shift planning and time tracking are presented as separate modules today. Sick calls do not automatically trigger time-tracking propagation - that integration is on the roadmap.