When I started with ZEIT.IO at the end of 2020, ZEIT.IO was a tool that agencies could use to manage their freelancers. Including contracts, time recording, approval process and invoice processing. With increasing use, customers wanted to be able to use it to manage their permanent employees, too. For this reason, the new context switch was introduced a few weeks ago. Permanent employees have a different menu than freelancers. Some menu items were provisional until recently. As of this week, all features for permanent employees are complete! Permanent employees can now also submit vacation and sick leave requests via ZEIT.IO.

The agreed vacation days per year are also recorded in the ZEIT.IO contract. For permanent employees, the "Vacation" item now appears directly in the main menu. The next 5 public holidays are always visible here, as well as the submitted vacations. The public holidays always depend on the federal state of the employer. In Germany, the public holidays of the federal state in which the employer has its headquarters always apply to permanent employees. If the company has several locations, then the public holidays of the state in which the location is located apply.

Here you can either submit a half day, a full day or several days of vacation. When the vacation is submitted, employers (HR managers / supervisors / department heads) are informed of the vacation via email and can comment on, reject, or approve the vacation request. In any case, the employee will also be informed of this via e-mail.

Of course, ZEIT.IO ensures that not more vacation days are submitted than agreed in the contract. In addition, ZEIT.IO also ensures that no overlapping vacations are submitted. If the vacation lasts for several weeks, then of course only the working days contained therein are counted as vacation days. Weekends and public holidays are of course deducted.

In addition, the employee can always see how many vacation days are left.

Sick leave is now one of the main menu items for permanent employees. The employee can also enter half a day, a full day or several sick days here. Optionally, it is possible to upload a PDF file or an image (.JPG, .PNG) with the sick note. Such as a scanned medical certificate from the family doctor. Sickness notifications are currently always automatically approved and employers (HR managers / supervisors / department heads) are informed immediately via e-mail about the sickness notification.

If something is wrong with the sick note, the organisational admins (employers) can delete the sick note from the system. However, that shouldn't be the norm.

Depending on the agreed weekly working time in the contract, ZEIT.IO calculates the individual target working time for each user per month. Public holidays, vacations and sick days are of course deducted from this. If you now navigate to "Times", you will always see the planned working time for the selected period.

In the example above you can see that the planned working time for the current week is 40 hours and so far 16:05 hours have been booked. If there were a public holiday during the week, the planned working time would only be 32 hours.

If you click on "Contracts" in the main menu and navigate to your current contract, you will now see a new "Working Hours" tab in the contract. Here you can see at a glance how many working hours, overtime, vacation days, sick days and public holidays you had per month.

In the example above you can see that the user accumulated some overtime in the months of March, April and May. For the current month of June, the planned working time is 100 hours, 44.25 hours have already been booked and 55.75 hours are still open. So you can see at a glance in which months you had overtime or undertime.

As an admin of an organisation, you can now see all vacations and sick days of your employees under the main menu item "Users". There is also a tab for working hours in which you can see at a glance which employees have how much overtime for a selected month.

In the example above you can see that 3 employees worked more in May than they should. The other employees didn't work enough. Of course, the whole thing is also available with a yearly view.

Feel free to try out the new features, and please provide feedback.
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