Time off and training

Two things that used to live in somebody's memory, or in a WhatsApp message nobody can find.

Time off

Your team asks from their own phone. On the worker app there is a Time off tab: they pick the first and last day, say what kind it is, and add a line if there is anything you should know.

You see it in two places: on your dashboard under "Waiting on an answer", and on the Time off screen in the sidebar. Coordinators can answer these as well as owners, because deciding who is away next week is scheduling.

You approve or decline, and you can add a note back that they will see.

What approving actually does

An approved request takes that person out of availability for those days. They will not be offered an open shift that falls in them, and they will not come up as free when you are looking for somebody.

A request that is still waiting does nothing at all. Until you have said yes, it is not a promise, and we are not going to quietly withhold work from somebody on the strength of a request you have not seen.

The last day counts. Monday to Friday means Friday is a day off, not a day back.

When they are already booked

If you approve time off that covers visits they are already on, we let it through. The leave is nearly always the newer fact, and a system that refuses just means you agree on the phone and nothing gets recorded.

What we do instead is tell you which visits now need somebody, by name and date, with a link to each one. That is the actual work, and nothing else in the system would have mentioned it.

Booking somebody off yourself

If somebody rings in sick you can record it from the Time off screen without waiting for them to ask. It goes straight in as approved, because you deciding it is the decision.

Taking a request back

Your team can withdraw a request you have not answered yet. Once you have answered, they have to ring you, because by then you may have rebuilt the week around it.

Training

Settings → Training is where you list the courses everybody on your team has to hold. Safeguarding, first aid, manual handling, medication: whatever applies where you are. There is no default list, because what is mandatory is different in every country and every line of work.

An agency that lists none is not failing anything. Plenty do not need this.

Each person's courses go on their own page, under Training, next to their documents. A course has a name, who ran it, the date it was done, and the date it runs out. Leave the expiry empty if the course does not expire.

The part worth understanding

Somebody with no record of a required course is not trained.

That sounds obvious, and it is the thing most systems get wrong, because a screen built by listing what exists shows a person with nothing at all as a clean page. That is the exact opposite of the truth, and it is the person somebody will ask you about.

So the list you set in Settings is what everyone is counted against. On your team list you will see "2 short" next to anybody missing one, and on their own page it will say which ones and whether each was never recorded or has run out.

Someone with everything current reads "Current". Someone with a course due for renewal in the next two months reads "due", which still counts as in order today.

Names do not have to match exactly

"Safeguarding", "safeguarding" and " Safeguarding " are all the same course. Capital letters and extra spaces do not matter.

What does matter is that they are the same words. "First aid" will not satisfy "Paediatric first aid", and that is deliberate: a screen that is generous about what counts is worse than one that makes you type the name properly.

If somebody has done a course twice, they are judged on the most recent one.

Reminders

Training that is coming up for renewal goes into the same morning email as expiring documents, rather than a second email about the same person on the same day. It also shows on your dashboard and in the bell at the top of the screen.

Training that was never recorded at all does not go in that email. On the day you switch this on it would list every course nobody has ever logged, which is not readable. That question is answered on your team list instead, where you can act on it.