Using Time and Budgets to track Team Members time-off

DianeK
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You can create work items in Karbon to track sick leave, vacation or even holidays.

We are using Time and Budgets to track PTO.  We created a work item using our business as the client and put it on a yearly repeat.  When Team members are using PTO, they make a time entry here and it tracks back to their timesheet.  It also provides a place where you can see at a glance how much PTO has been used by each person and how much has been used company wide for the year.  You can do this for Sick Leave and Holidays.  This has been working well for my company.

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Lisa Silver
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Diane, 

Thank you for this thought.  We too are using Time and Budgets to track PTO.  How are you sorting to see the total hours by each person, we can only see the multiple dates and the hours spent on those dates.  Were you meaning that you just add up the time from this view, or you are able to see a total per staff member? 

Lisa
DianeK
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We created a work item called PTO - Time Tracking 2021 and we have each team member log their time to this work item.  If I am taking today off, I would log 8 hours to the PTO work item.  When you are on the time and budget tab of the work item, you can see the total number in the Budget Overview area at the top. If you want to see how much time each person has taken off, you would look at the Budget By Team Member area lower down on the page.  It breaks it down by each person’s time logged to the work item.

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Lisa Silver
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I think I was just looking at the client to find the information instead of the work item.  Thank you, this is very helpful!

Lisa
max
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This is an interesting work-around. Are any of you piping the time and billing from Karbon into a general ledger or invoicing software?

We are using QuickBooks Time and the integration needs quite a bit of work before it’s usable for us. We are making it work for us, but I was wondering how people are handling the next step.

This might be a whole new topic, I’m not sure.

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DianeK
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We have used QuickBooks time, but we are trying to transition over to just using Karbon.  We have an invoicing step in our work items.  We leave pricing details there and then I create and send an invoice from our QuickBooks account.  When we get the notice that the invoice has been paid, it gets tagged to the work item.  Not completed automated here yet, but we are getting closer.

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Curtis Braun
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@DianeK Thanks for this post; I am just stumbling across this as our firm is exploring using Karbon for Time Entry. I’m curious about setting up vacation/sick time this way as it would cut down on how we track this currently in excel. However because all staff would have access to this work item and the data therein, were you concerned at all about staff having full visibility on everyone’s budgeted vacation time? 

Also, I recall seeing in another post that your firm was using an internal group with separate contacts for vacation, sick time, holidays etc. Do you set up a work item in each of those individual contacts to monitor vacation, sick time etc. vs. tracking it all in one work item assigned to one contact?

DianeK
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@Curtis Braun  We did adjust this work item to make it less public.  It is assigned to our business manager and on an HR private contact in Karbon.  Team Members request time off from the business manager.  If approved, she adds the details to the work item and sends them an approved leave notice.  

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Curtis Braun
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@DianeK Thanks for your reply here - appreciate it! Do the staff members still charge their time to a “Internal - Vacation” time code that is public? If so, how does the business manager get the actual vacation time taken into the private work item with budget vs. actual since actuals are tied to the staff members time entries (which they wouldn’t be able to post time against since the HR contact is private). Or do you not use the budgets feature any more to monitor that? Thanks!

DianeK
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We still have the Time and Budget feature on the private work item.  The business manager adds each person’s time off to the work to track.  The time is tracked on each Team Member’s timesheet by making a manual entry for paid time off.  It isn’t tied to a specific work item in their log.  It is logged to an internal client.

Process:

  • Team Member requests time off
  • Business manager approves time off and logs this to the private HR work item for tracking
  • On the date of the time off, the Team member manually creates a time entry for 8 hours logged to an internal client but not a specific piece of work.

I hope that makes sense.  This allowed us to still track but keep the information private.

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Curtis Braun
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@DianeK Almost following! I am following bullet point #1 and #3, but for #2 when the business manger logs the time off request to the private HR work item, what do they do in that work item? Do they update the budget for that team member for the cumulative amount of time request/approved? Or something else?

I was hoping to have the budget for each person equal to their annual vacation allotment for example and then the actual data would flow from the staff member’s time sheets so I could see how much vacation time they had remaining, but then I ran into the issue with the work item therefore needing to be public to everyone.

So if you have found a way to update the “Actuals” column in the work item without the staff member needing to code time to that work item, or a different way to track this in the work item I would be interested in how that works.

Thanks for your help with this! 

DianeK
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I don’t have access to the private work item but I believe she updates the Time and Budget tab to log each time off request to each person.  Then she can see the total time off used each year by each team member.

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