Absence

This screen and the Contract menu can be seen by any user that has active contract settings. The Absence screen can be seen by any user that has the absence permission.

Email notification

When managing absences, emails including the type of absence/comment/action/username/date-range will be sent out.

Notification emails will be sent to the user and the supervisor (if one is configured). The supervisor is a setting in the users profile.

Set up your teams

To ensure the workflow functions properly, you need to set up your teams in a specific way.

Create a team for each department or organisational unit.

• Add the supervisor as the team lead.
• Add each subordinate as a team lead.

This setup is required because otherwise the supervisor might not be able to see the user in the dropdown menu.

Approval workflow

There are 2 phases that each absence has to go through:

• New absence: moves the absence to the Requested list and sends an email to the supervisor to ask for confirmation
  • Approval by the supervisor: the absence will be moved to the Approved list and an email is sent to the user to confirm the approval
  • Rejection by the supervisor: the absence will be moved back to the New list and an email is sent to the user to inform about the rejection
• Approved absences: can still be deleted, until they are locked

How absences affect expected working time

Kimai supports two calculation modes for absences:

1. Absences count as worked time and compensate the expected working time for the day (default)
2. Absences reduce the expected working time for the day

The selected mode affects how total expected hours and worked hours are calculated for each month. This can be relevant for payroll, overtime, and PTO calculations.

You can configure the mode individually for each absence type in System → Settings, depending on your company rules and industry requirements.

1. Absences compensate expected working time for the day

In this mode, every scheduled working day keeps its full expected number of hours.

This means Kimai assumes that time must be accounted for on every working day, regardless of whether the employee is working, on vacation, sick, or absent due to a public holiday.

The absence duration is then counted as worked time and offsets the expected time.

Example: if a working day has 8 expected hours, a full vacation day will count as 8 worked hours.

2. Absences reduce the expected working time for the day

In this mode, an absence reduces the expected working time for the affected day by the duration of the absence.

Example: if a working day has 8 expected hours, a full vacation day reduces the expected working time for that day to 0 hours, and the worked time will also be 0 hours.

Absence types

Please read the chapter “How calculations work” to understand how your Working times are calculated.

Holiday / Vacation

When you are eligible for holidays, meaning that your contract settings have a value for Holidays per year, you can schedule your vacations here.

• Vacation days need to be approved
• Vacation days can be full days or half-days
• You can book ranges of holidays
• Days without expected working hours will be ignored when creating vacations

Sickness

Everyone can enter sickness entries.

• Sickness days are auto-approved
• Sickness days can be entered as date-range
• Sickness entries will always account for the (remaining) daily working time
• If you have already entered working-time the same day, sickness will fill up the remaining open time
• There are no “half-day” entries available, because a half-day of sickness means, that there needs to at least one time-entry with 50% of the expected working-time. Example:
  • The expected working-time for the day is 8h
  • The users entered a timesheet of 4h
  • The user now adds a sickness entry: this will fill up the remaining 4h

My child is sick

Use the drop-down next to the “Report sickness” button and select the Sickness of a relative category.

Time-Off

PTO (personal time-off) entries are for informational purpose, they do NOT influence your actual workimg time by themselves.

• Time-Off needs to be approved
• Kimai reduces your working time account for that period, because you do not record working-time during your PTO

Other absences

Please add everything that does not fit the other categories in Other absences.

• The type Other absences needs to be approved
• Can be a date range or a duration

Parental leave

Parental leaves always cover a date-range of full days.

Unpaid holidays

Unpaid holidays cover a date-range of full days.

Absence calendar

There is a monthly report available, showing all approved absences at Report → Absence calendar.

The required permission to see that report is absence. To see absences of other users you require view_other_absence (e.g. other team members) and view_other_reporting (to select other teams).

There is also view_team_absence which you can assign to the regular User role, so they can see absences of all team members.

Creating absences for next year

You can always only select absences for the currently selected year. If you want to create absence requests in advance for next year, you have to change the selected year by:

• clicking on the year dropdown and selecting the correct entry
• clicking on the button to move to the next year

Carry over absences into the new year

While this video talks about your time balance, the workflow is the same.

• Switch to the next year
• Go to “Manual bookings: Holiday”
• Open it and click “Create”
  • Select the 01. January and
  • Enter the remaining days from the previous year
  • Enter a comment like “Remaining vacations from previous year”
  • Save

Switch back to the previous year and remember to lock the entire year.

Permissions

Name	Description
absence	View absences, e.g. the Absence screen at Employment contract > Absence or the Absence calendar
edit_own_absence	Edit the own absences
edit_other_absence	Edit other users absences
delete_own_absence	Delete the own absence entries
delete_other_absence	Delete other users absence entries
view_team_absence	Teamleads can see team member absences in the Absence calendar report
view_other_absence	Allows to switch the user in the Absence screen and the team in the Absence calendar report, also influences the visibility of absence entries in the calendar
approve_own_absence	Approve own absence requests
approve_other_absence	Approve absence requests of team members (or whose supervisor is not set)
approval_other_absence	Request an approval on behalf of another user