Five Important Features of a Holidays Management System

While working as an ERP consultant recently, I had to help a HR Manager whose main problem was managing leave, and excessive leave problems.

We were told that leave abuse was their biggest problem. 10 percent may not sound like a lot, but in an organisation with 200 employees and very little or no excess capacity, it was very high.

After careful review we realized the problem was management. Management allowed the abuse to grow and become a problem by not being proactive. They never had the tool required to provide them the proper information and the holidays approval and record process was very manual and paper based.

They had previously tried to implement an Excel sheet shared in the organisation as well but still the process couldn’t be improved further and the information was still cumbersome to find and manage.

Doesn’t this sound like a story of every company. Human Resource Management is the biggest task of every company. Your employees are your assets and you need to make sure your assets are well looked after and you have necessary information about your employees as and when needed. This information can be their resumes and skills knowledge or their training history and their holiday requests as well as sick leave information.

There was recently a post where a company introduced walking meetings to improve company health and reduce sick leaves. But these initiatives can only be started based on the data received from your holidays management system.

In general this is what your holiday management system must have:

1. An easy to use interface to access the leave/holiday request form. Web based Holidays management systems are the best and if you can have mobile responsive interfaces they are good enough but you can always look for a Mobile App as well which will help your employees request holidays on the move (specially useful for field staff).
2. An approval workflow where the line manager should first approve the day off requested by the employee and if needed a second level approval can be requested as well from a senior manager. The approval queue should be configurable easily as well. What if a particular manager leaves or is on holidays himself?
3. HR Manager should have overall information and approval access and she should be able to run necessary reports by department and by employee. There is a very thin line between Personal Information Security and information sharing. Don’t forget a team member being on holiday is useful information for other members of the team but their reason of holidays may not be something for everyone to see.
4. Employees should also be able to submit time sheets and overtime which is submitted to their line manager for approval.
5. Accounting Reports or Integration is another important feature for an HRM (Human Resource Management) System. Accounting Department should be able to run reports based on the time sheet and calculate the salary for each employee easily.

The above list can be longer or shorter based on your specific organisation requirements but don’t forget just a payroll system may not be sufficient to manage your human resources in the company.

And lastly if you are looking for a cost effective solution don’t forget to check some of the open source options out there. You can always rely on Odoo based HR Management provided by Target Integration.