Employee weekly schedule availability

[lwilliams]

Greetings,

We'd like to have a Schedule tab on every Employee so that we could enter each Employee's available hours for every day of the week and also be able to enter exceptions for when they will be unavailable for a day or a week or more at a time (e.g. vacation).

Ideally that would "flow through" to the Dispatcher screens so that Employees will only appear available to be scheduled during times that they are actually available for us, according to the weekly availability schedule and exceptions we set up on each Employee.

Right now we have to keep checking our part time employees' schedules that we have noted in the Notes section of Employee to make sure we don't make an appointment for someone when they are not available to work for us. It would be great if we could just enter their availability and then Dispatch would not be able to schedule them for their UNavailable times. (Perhaps the unavailable times could be grayed-out on the calendar?)

It would be *great* to hear that we are missing something and this or similar feature is there for us, but I've searched Commit's KB and cannot find mention of it.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Best regards,
Lisa Williams
A-1 Tech Support

[Support Team]

Re: Employee weekly schedule availability

Hi Lisa,

Thanks for your input on this.

My current suggestion is to add recurring appointments for the time employees are not available and set a color, say, red, to these appointments.
For example, if Joe is not available every Tuesday between 1 PM and 6 PM, add a recurring appointment for this. In the description of the appointment write "unavailable" or any other text/reason on why he is not available.
The dispatcher will then always see the times when employees are not available and will not schedule jobs to them during these times (just like the dispatcher does not schedule on site visits for other busy/already scheduled times).

HTH

Sherry

[lwilliams]

Re: Employee weekly schedule availability

Hi Sherry,

Thank you for your suggestion on how to show unavailable times for our Employees. We will do that.

We'd also like to see our suggestion of a Schedule tab added to Employees with "flow through" to the Dispatcher screen. Will you please submit that for development to consider adding?

Thanks again.

Best regards,
Lisa Williams
A-1 Tech Support

[Support Team]

Re: Employee weekly schedule availability

Sure, it's on our list already :-)

[lwilliams]

Re: Employee weekly schedule availability

That's great news - Thanks!

Best regards,
Lisa Williams
A-1 Tech Support

[nattivillin]

Re: Employee weekly schedule availability

This seems like a lot of extra work to workaround the ability to set available work times. Have no choice but to create recurring appointments until this feature is added.

[bdbrower]

Re: Employee weekly schedule availability

I agree that this should be a high priority feature addition. Creating "availability blocks" as appointments is awkward and they show up in all Calendar reports (no way to filter them out, as far as I can tell). And you can only enter them 99 days out (which is the limit for recurring appointments).