Edition: Business*, Enterprise*
User-level: Director, System administrator, managers with direct reports
*Only available with SynergyHR
The availability planner within SynergyHR allows you to have full visibility over when people in your company will be unavailable to work. Having this information accessible at all times will help you to more accurately resource people on projects and enable more reliable future planning. It will also allow you to view, add, approve, deny, or modify unavailability/leave applications all within the same area in Synergy.
What does the availability planner show me?
The team availability page shows:
A history of all the times staff were unavailable or scheduled as unavailable in the future.
Different options for status requests – declined, approved, requested or cancelled.
Managers can see requests for their direct reports and themselves, whereas administrators can see the entire organisation.
Filtering on the availability planner
There are multiple ways and different reasons to filter results in the Team availability/My availability pages.
Start after or ends before - Who is unavailable between 15 December and 15 January?
Type - Who is on professional development (attending the International Architects conference)? This is a list of your organisation's internal project stages.
Status - Do I have any availability requests that I have not acknowledged?
Staff (only in Team availability) - Do I want to see my own availability or that of my staff? Managers can see staff as Me, My staff and me. Availability administrators will have visibility to all, My staff (if applicable) and me.
Search - This will find any part of the search term in the availability request, including in the comment field
Managing availability
In the team availability page, you can make changes to an availability request in two ways.
Click on the ellipsis icon.
You then have several options.
Set as approved - The manager has acknowledged it and it is approved (not applicable in My availability).
Set as declined - The manager has said the staff member can’t go at this time (not applicable in My availability).
Set as cancelled - The user changed their mind.
Set as requested - reverts an approved request back to requested status.
Edit details - same action as when you click on a row.
If as a manager, you click on your own name, you will only see the options ‘Set as cancelled’ or ‘Edit details’. This is because someone else will need to acknowledge your change in availability.
Click on a row.
When you click on a row, a dialog will open.
Type - If an incorrect request was submitted, change it here.
Start and end dates - Use the date picker to change it to the correct dates.
Comment - You can add onto any comments already written. This text box does not support versioning, so make sure to initial your comments.
Requested and approved availability applications
When you see purple in the grid, this means the staff member corresponding to the row is unavailable for the days shown in the header row.
The purple background shows the unavailable period.
If the row is a solid colour, this means the request is approved.
However, if the row is striped, the request is awaiting approval and are not included in the resource calculations.
When you click on the purple background, you will open the right-hand sidebar.
In the instance there are two unavailability types taken in the same week, this is shown as separate entries
When you expand the row, you will see the internal project on the left menu.
In the grid, you will see the number of utilised hours you are unavailable at a weekly level.
When you expand the internal project, you will see a breakdown of the types of unavailable time.
Example: When an availability request is approved, the number of hours marked in the weekly total shows the total of utilised time.
For example if your target utilisation is 90%, and you take one day of leave, this equates to 5.23 hours. So you will see 5.23 hours for that week.
Similarly, if you take the whole week off you will see 5.23 * 5 or 23.17 hours.
The staff summary hours and total summary hours also includes unavailable hours, once a request is approved.
In the instance, the same type of unavailability is taken during different weeks, when the row is expanded, you will see them grouped in the one row, ie you will see leave taken in April and leave taken in June all on the same row.