One of our lesser requested, but still valuable features sees the light of day today.

Great news for everyone that uses Outlook: You can now set calendar events to appear as "Out of Office" in iCal feeds and Calendar Integrations.

Set it in your Leave Type Settings where you'd usually set Busy or Available.

For those of you using Google Calendar or any of the 600+ other calendar apps that consume our feeds, you'll see Out Of Office items appear as "Busy" in your calendar.

iCal feeds and calendar feeds can take from 30 minutes to 24hours to update once you change the status so bear with us while we process the updates.

We've just rolled out a lovely new feature for capping leave types.

With this, you can set a limit on how many days or hours of a leave type your users can take in a year:

You can apply this to any type of leave, whether it affects allowances or not. 

And if you want to keep it flexible, just set the limit to "Unlimited" and a user can book as much of that leave as their allowance allows.

There's more info on this on our help site: Leave types

For all Timetastic approvers, managers and Admins (on Pro or Business) there's a new toggle in your email preferences which we've turned on: 

Negative balance alerts!

Once a month you'll get a summary of who has a negative balance giving you the opportunity to check or amend a user's allowance or bookings.

That's it, super simple but hopefully useful for seeing when one of your users balances has gone awry.

Hello!

Today we have released a new feature we've wanted to do for a while: Expiring Carry Forward 🎉 

If you allow users to carry forward some of their unused allowance into the next year, you can now set a time limit for when that carried forward allowance should be used by:

The default value is 12 months, so the user has the whole leave year to use the carry forward in, but you can amend this to be any value from 1-12 months.

We've also given the allowances tab a nice new cleaner look:

Today we have updated our privacy policy.
The changes are purely to make it clearer that we are part of the Citation Group and as such they also have access to data that we hold.

https://timetastic.co.uk/legal/privacy-policy

We've just pushed an update to our reporting to make things easier for you.

Now we've got better work schedules we can report on the actual working time off your users took, so from now on you'll see more columns in the reports: 

So instead of you trying to figure out exactly when someone wasn't at work, we now show the time off according to the user's work schedule ⏲️

These appear in annual summary reports and the backup report's leave tab.  

Sorry if we've broken anyone's macros or formulas but hopefully this helps you out.

Department settings is getting some love today - we've updated it to show you how many people are in each department and made saving changes to departments more obvious. 

API customers will know this also removes some older no longer used fields for departments - if you've not updated your integration you'll start seeing errors now.

Rolled into this release we've also fixed some issues with Insights not showing days or hours correctly and some behind the scenes improvements.

Hi all,

Happy Monday!

Today we have a new user access level for you, "Director" 🎉 

Where a department manager can see all employees win their own department, a Director is one level above that and can see a read-only view of all the departments and bookings on the Wallchart and view all users' calendars️.

For those of you with Timetastic Pro accounts, your Directors can see the Insights page too.

You can set someone to be a Director in their user profile page:

Fresh out today we've got an improvement to the user uploader.

Instead of uploading everyone with an allowance in days and then converting them to an hourly allowance one by one, you can just put a H in the last column of your upload and we'll create your users with hourly allowances now. 

A small improvement that'll hopefully save some of you some time.

In our recent privacy push we've got another change coming to Leave Types. This is probably one of our most requested features and we've been working on it for a bit in the background.

From today, everyone with Timetastic (Business and Pro) will get the ability to set leave types as "public" or "private"

This replaces the existing privacy mode toggle in Settings > General

All your leave types will be set according to that setting but now you can make individual leave types visible to everyone. Working from home is a good example of where we've had this requested.

Head to Settings > Leave Types and set the visibility to "Public" or "Private":

Public: 

Sets the leave type to be visible to everyone in your organisation regardless of whether they're a user, manager, approver or Admin user. 

Private:

Hides leave type details from everyone who isn't a user's approver, manager or admin users.

This affects Timetastic, external calendar integrations, Slack, Teams and API requests. You'll also be able to set it in the mobile app once the latest app update is out.