A vacation management program that is easy to use, affordable, and enables the finalization of the entire process without the need to print anything is what many entrepreneurs dream about. If your company uses Jira, implementing the vacation management functionalities will be fairly easy – all you need is the Vacation Manager for Jira app.

Companies that do not use Atlassian solutions (yet) are encouraged to read this article as well. We continuously recommend the Atlassian ecosystem for business process handling (Jira Software, Jira Work Management), customer service (Jira Service Management), and as an intranet/extranet solution (Confluence). We are creating and implementing a coherent work environment, which may be further developed through special applications or the custom development service.

Vacation Manager – vacation management program

Our specialists have already developed a series of add-ons that offer useful and practical solutions implemented in the Jira and Confluence environments. Vacation Manager for Jira is one of them, gaining more and more popularity with the increasing interest in transferring business processes into IT systems.

Thanks to this tool we can offer our clients a tried and tested solution for vacation management in the company.

The application enables i.a.:

  • Creating vacation requests and submitting them for the supervisor’s approval;
  • Reporting days and hours off with 30-minute accuracy;
  • Appointing a replacement for the time of absence;
  • Displaying vacation information under the user selection fields – when browsing and creating requests in the Jira system.
  • Approving/rejecting / requesting more information about the request or canceling previously approved request (supervisor’s menu);
  • Creating separate teams/departments with assigned supervisors;
  • Accessing vacation statistics – users can see the number of used and unused vacation days, supervisors also have access to the statistics of their teams and the HR team has access to the extended statistics of all users (with a cross-section overview option, e.g. by vacation type);
  • Displaying an additional notification of a given user’s absence directly in the Jira system;
  • Flexible calendar configuration – every user may have his or her own days off calendar and defined working time (the default is 8 hours per day).

 

Thanks to the Vacation Manager, every stage of the vacation management process is completed in Jira. Using a tool integrated with Jira means avoiding the costs of implementing and handling an external system. The HR team does not need to worry about handling and entering paper requests into the system, as the employees submit vacation requests themselves, and the supervisors may approve or reject them immediately. For employees who work with Jira daily, using Vacation Manager is as simple and intuitive as creating an ordinary task in any other project.

A simpler process for employees, management, and HR

Vacation Manager for Jira has many functionalities (the most important of which we have listed above) assigned to three main groups of people that perform key roles in the vacation management process. The application group options are assigned to each of these groups to organize specific tasks. (As you would not allow a situation in which one employee approves a request of another employee of the same position or may access the vacation information of the whole department.) Vacation Manager for Jira takes into account the diversity of vacation management roles, which is why it offers separate menus for the following:

  • Company employees – all the people who submit vacation requests.
  • Management – supervisors who make decisions regarding vacation requests.
  • HR team that supervises the provision of all necessary data and monitors statistics.
  • Administrator – managing the core settings of the application.

Each of these groups uses a separate menu with capabilities adjusted to their obligations.

Screenshot of Vacation Manager solution showing different Menus and functionalities for different audiences, screenshot from Vacation Manager for Jira application.

User Menu. An employee may:

  • Submit vacation requests and appoint his or her replacement (If the selected deputy/supervisor has upcoming holidays planned, the applicant is notified accordingly).

Capabilities of Vacation Manager for Jira, submission of requests by employee with designation of deputy, screenshot from Vacation Manager for Jira application of Transition Technologies PSC team

  • Browse all submitted requests and their statuses (approved/rejected), as well as draft requests that have not been sent for approval yet.

A screenshot from Vacation Manager for Jira, a view of the list of requests in the left column and one of the selected requests on the right. On it, we see the request's title, status and the information the user filled out when creating the request in Jira.

  • View his or her statistics and plan a vacation based on the days off displayed in the dedicated calendar.

A view of personal statistics related to an employee's vacation requests, a screenshot from Transition Technologies PSC's Vacation Manager for Jira application, shows pie charts and information on upcoming vacations by category, e.g. requested days off, sick leave, day off for education, maternity leave

Supervisor Menu. Supervisor options:

  • A list of requests for approval. Supervisors have access to all the vacation documents of their teams; they can approve a request straight away, ask for more information (e.g. appointing or changing the replacement), reject a request, or cancel a request that they have already approved.

A view of the decision path associated with a leave request, a tree of statuses and transitions of the request from submission, to approval by the supervisor

!Important: A project manager/manager and members of the HR team – if they belong to a team, they also have a “user menu” and may submit vacation requests as any other employee.

HR Management

The HR team has an additional tab that enables:

  • Creating teams, i.e. groups of users that have the same supervisor, work on the same project, and in the same department. Creating teams helps, above all, follow the statistics and develop a work schedule.

Screenshot from Vacation Manager for Jira showing the ability to add a new team or group of users to the system. This can be done by an HR employee

Screenshot from Vacation Manager for Jira showing the ability to edit a previously created team or group of application users. This can be done by an HR professional.

  • Appointing days off for employees (necessary at the beginning of using Vacation Manager and when entering anyone newly employed into the system; the HR team needs to fill in the employee’s holiday entitlement; this option is also used when an employee takes e.g. maternity leave).

Screenshot of the Vacation Manager for Jira application from Transition Technologies PSC showing how an HR employee assigns vacation days to a user, i.e., an employee who belongs to a previously created team/user group

  • Holiday Schemes enables importing a calendar of public holidays (from a file) or manual marking of public, religious, or other holidays. Employees do not need to worry that statutory holidays covered by their vacation requests will be deducted from their holiday entitlement.

Screenshot of Transition Technologies PSC's Vacation Manager for Jira application showing what the calendar can look like with marked public holidays or company-defined days off

  • Workweek Schemes – defining working days of the week – for the entire company or certain teams/employees (e.g. when someone works Saturdays and has Mondays off).

Screenshot of the Vacation Manager for Jira application from Transition Technologies PSC showing how to edit the weekly work schedule - the HR team determines with this functionality which days of the week are working and which are not.

  • Monitoring statistics – the HR team can check statistics by selecting the type of reported vacations (by vacation type) or reviewing statistics for a specific user (by user). This allows to verify the utilization of vacations, for example, when an employee should use accrued leave by the end of the year.

Screenshot of the Vacation Manager for Jira application from Transition Technologies PSC showing statistics on vacation requests. An HR professional can filter them by selecting the type of request or date range, as well as group them and view requests per user or the entire team.

Admin Menu

An administrator is a person who has access to the settings of the entire application. The two main functionalities of Vacation Manager for Jira for the administrator role are:

  • Application configuration:

Screenshot of the Vacation Manager for Jira application from Transition Technologies PSC showing the Administrator view with the header "Configure Vacation Manager" which means access to the settings of the entire application.

  • Access to managing Vacation Types:

Screenshot of the Vacation Manager for Jira application from Transition Technologies PSC showing the Administrator's view of the Menu for managing vacation request types with the heading "Manage Vacation Types" .

Vacation types

Vacation Manager for Jira makes it possible to define different types of vacation that an employee may request (as new request types in Jira). They are set by the administrator for the entire organization.

Examples:

  • One-day leave (counted in full days)

Screenshot of the Vacation Manager for Jira application from Transition Technologies PSC showing a view of the day application type and the headings the user must fill in to submit such an application. There are headings such as start date, end date, description, ability to add attachments, among others.

  • Half-day leave (the employee chooses which part of the day he or she wants to take off)

Screenshot of the Vacation Manager for Jira application from Transition Technologies PSC showing a view of the half-day application type and the headings the user must fill out to submit such an application. Among other things, there are headings such as the start date, description, the ability to add attachments, and the "half-day" option checked in the "time slot" section

  • Hourly leave (the employee may submit a request for 30 minutes or several or a dozen hours off)

Vacation Manager for Jira, Half day leave, vacation request in Jira, half day off request in Jira, vacation requests Vacation Manager for Jira, Transition Technologies PSC

Why should you choose Vacation Manager for Jira?

  • The application is integrated with Jira – the company may handle its processes within one environment; if it has already been using Jira software, the investment in the application will be more affordable than in the case of a separate solution.
  • If the employees already know the Jira system, they will find the Vacation Manager very intuitive; the company will save time and money for training.
  • Managing vacation in a coherent system simplifies the process for the ENTIRE organization; it eliminates chain e-mails, the need to print requests, as well as the frustration coming from the lack of statistics for days off.
  • The add-on is constantly updated, and our specialists are open for contact and feedback.
  • We guarantee a free trial period for testing the add-on.

Vacation management, although it may sound trivial, requires completing a number of tasks that, if executed outside of a system, are time-consuming and often cause disruption. Vacation Manager for Jira solves communication problems, makes the whole process smooth and guarantees that the data are complete and stored in one place. Feel free to contact us!

How useful was this post?

Click on a star to rate it!

Average rating 0 / 5. Vote count: 0

No votes so far! Be the first to rate this post.

If you violate the Regulations , your post will be deleted.

    _All posts in this category

    Document Management System at Jira - digital transformation for government, accounting, office and more

    Document System Management is the basis for digitizing business processes. See how it is possible to transfer and archive documents in the Jira…
    Read more

    Migrating Jira Server to Jira Cloud

    20 years after entering the IT market, Atlassian is still one of the world's leading providers of enterprise software solutions - from test…
    Read more

    Automatic and manual tests - test management platform based on Jira Software + Xray

    One of the strategic stages of software development work is testing - every single "package" of code should be tested in order to…
    Read more

    Customer Portal in Jira Service Management: notifications, automation, knowledge base, SLA

    The Customer Portal is easy to use, and at the same time it offers advanced configuration possibilities. It is a solution dedicated to…
    Read more

    Jira Service Desk becomes Jira Service Management. New name, more possibilities.

    The year 2020, and especially its end, is the time of changes announced by the producer of Jira software. Recently, we have heard…
    Read more

    Jira Cloud vs Jira Server

    What does Jira Cloud have that Jira Server doesn’t? What benefits does it offer, what functionalities are worth noting, and do both these…
    Read more

    BigPicture 8.0 – a new, better version of the PMO add-on for Jira Software

    BigPicture by SoftwarePlant, a new version of the project management and PMO development addendum in Jira, is coming. What changes will it bring?…
    Read more

    Agility. All you need to know about the agile methodology

    What actually is agile? How did it all start? What are the principles that characterise this working method, how does it differ from…
    Read more

    How do Jira and Confluence help you build your Information Security Management System?

    The turn of June and July 2019 was an intense time for us. Due to the increasingly dynamic development of companies in the…
    Read more

    What software should you choose to work remotely?

    At a time of the coronavirus threat, the ability to work from home is no longer a privilege, but a necessity. The employees…
    Read more

    Jira Core – a tool for effective work and project management for the marketing team

    A good marketing team consists of people who have different, complementary skills: content, SEO, paid campaigns specialists, graphic designers, developers, analysts, PR or…
    Read more

    Atlassian Summit 2020 – we’ll be there!

    After a two-year break we return to the Atlassian Summit as sponsors of the event. In Las Vegas, Tomasz Pabich, Project Manager, will…
    Read more

    Jira as CRM system

    Jira by Atlassian is software well-known all over the world; it is associated mainly with solutions for developer teams. The tool can be…
    Read more

    Program for business trip expense reports – Jira

    Settling local and overseas business trip expenses is a process that companies would like to go through in possibly the least complicated and…
    Read more

    Logging work time - timesheets in the Jira system

    Timesheet processing, time tracking in Jira? No problem! If your company uses software by Atlassian, you don't have to invest in new solutions…
    Read more

    Atlassian Open 2019 – news, thoughts

    A strong emphasis on cloud solutions, customer-focused narration as well as promoting the idea of being “open”. What happened during Atlassian Open 2019…
    Read more

    Confluence by Atlassian – opinions and the most important functionalities from users' point of view

    Based on implementation in Transition Technologies Capital Group currently hires nearly 1000 employees working in broadly understood advanced technology field.
    Read more

    Atlassian Summit 2019 – summary, trends, changes

    Atlassian Summit is an annual even organized by an Australian producer of software for work management, among which the most popular ones are…
    Read more

    DevOps – from trend to standard

    DevOps idea appeared in IT field already in 2009 and since then, it has been systematically entering global business world as a method…
    Read more

    Jira Data Center – solution which does not let down. What is it and why is it worth investing in?

    Regardless of implemented tools, every company needs an environment where they can embed their own processes and manage them. A perfect tool for…
    Read more

    _Let’s get in touch

    Contact us