Although AceProject has no specific functionality designed to handle absences and holidays, here are a few ideas as to what can be accomplished and how.
Scheduling employee leave time and monitoring leave time taken
Leave time can be assigned to employees through tasks in a project specifically dedicated to employee absences for a given year (let’s call the project “Employee Leave Time” for the sake of simplicity). At the end of the year, the project would be closed and all balances would be transferred to the following year’s “Employee Leave Time” project.
Please note that when assigning an employee to an “employee leave time” task, you would need to assign hours to the user as AceProject does not allow to assign days. Hence, you will probably want to work with the equivalent of a day’s work in hours. Additionally, the period of absence of the user would need to be recorded using the Estimated Start Date and the Estimated End Date.
The user would need to record time taken as leave in his/her timesheets against the corresponding task.
HR officer(s) would also be assigned to the “Employee Leave Time” project and would be able to monitor when an employee is supposed to be away based on the Estimated Start Date and Estimated End Date of the tasks in the project. That would allow HR officers to make sure employees record absences in their timesheets in due time.
Finally, both parties would be able to see assigned leave hours and taken leave hours through the Statistics page at the project level.
Monitoring employee availability
Further to the above information, since there is no mechanism that prevents a user from being assigned to a task for whatever reason, here are a few additional steps that would need to be taken to prevent assignments when a user has been assigned leave time.
In the “Other Parameters” section of the user profile, set the “Typical Work Day” value just slightly less (for instance, a half hour less) than the normal number of hours the user works during workdays. The reason for this will become obvious as you read on.
Project Managers or whoever else performs assignments would need to have a look at the “By Project” user workload report ( under Home => More > Workload ) prior to performing assignments. On leave days, a user would appear overallocated (because daily assigned hours on a leave task would exceed the “Typical Work Day” value specified in the user profile) and the user workload report would clearly indicate that the over allocation is associated with hours assigned in the “Employee Leave Time” project.