Quick start guide for managers and approvers

Welcome to Timetastic! This guide will walk you through everything you need to get up and running and start managing your team’s time off with confidence.

Each step only takes a minute or two, so you'll be up to speed in no time. ✅

You'll learn how to:

1. Get familiar with the Wallchart
2. Check your employees' Calendars
3. Manage time off requests
4. Book and cancel leave
5. Add new employees
6. Create group bookings
7. Lock dates

Let's get started..

1. Get familiar with the Wallchart

The cornerstone of Timetastic is the Wallchart, your at-a-glance view of who’s off, when and why across your department. It gives you a clear picture of your team’s availability month by month.

With this visibility, planning becomes much easier and you can avoid major clashes before they happen. You can also quickly see how much leave allowance each employee has remaining for the current year.

2. Check your employees' Calendars

You can see your employees' Calendar view by clicking their names from the Wallchart: 

It shows all of their bookings for the year and a summary of all their time off on the right hand side.

The summary on the right outlines how much annual leave has been taken and what's remaining, as well as the total of all non-deductible leave below. 

3. Manage time off requests

By default, you'll receive time off requests via email, like this example:

Within Timetastic, you can see all outstanding leave requests in your inbox here:

If a booking request clashes with another staff member, they'll be flagged up.

If your company has the Microsoft Teams or Slack integration connected, requests can be sent to you as a direct message within Teams/Slack.

You can also handle time off requests via Timetastic's mobile app.

4. Book and cancel leave

Booking Leave

As a manager (or approver), you can book time off on behalf of your employees. There are two ways to do this:

1. The 'Book time off' button on the top right of the Wallchart and/or Calendar.

Select the employee from the 'Who for' field.

2. By clicking the day you are booking against the employee on the Wallchart or on their Calendar. You can also click and drag across a range of days if you are booking a longer period.

This way will bring up a pre-populated form to check through.

Cancelling Leave

Employees can cancel their own future bookings, but they’re unable to cancel leave that falls on today’s date or in the past.

If needed, you can cancel it on their behalf. Simply open the booking from the Wallchart or Calendar, click the Cancel icon, and confirm 'Cancel booking'.

5. Add new employees

Managers can also head to the Users page, where you’ll see just the people in the department(s) you manage. This is where you can add new team members or update existing profiles.

For more detail on this, check out our full guide: Adding users

To edit someone’s details, just click their name in the Users list to open their profile:

6. Group bookings

Need to book time off for your whole department in one go? That’s exactly what Group bookings are for. Perfect for things like team training days or closing over Christmas.

You’ll find the option under the main booking menu, just hover over the blue ‘+’ button to reveal the extra options.

You'll get the group booking form and you can select your department, leave type, dates and a reason.

Click 'Book', and you’re done. The date is automatically approved and everyone gets an email to let them know.

If you’d like the full step-by-step guide, take a look at: Group bookings

7. Lock dates

If you’ve got a busy period coming up and need everyone available, or there’s a team event nobody can miss - you can lock dates to stop new bookings being made. You can apply the lock to your whole department or just one person in the team.

Simply choose who it applies to, add a reason, and select the dates.

On your Wallchart hover over the 'Book time off' button and you'll see the option:

Click the 'Lock dates' button and the form will open:

Simply choose who it applies to, add a reason and select the dates.

Once a date is locked, your team will see a padlock on the Wallchart and Calendar. If they click it, they’ll see the reason for the lock:

For our full guide on this topic, please head to: Lock dates

But wait ... there’s more!

Once you’ve got these steps under control, there’s more to explore in Timetastic:

• Add Time in lieu (TOIL) for your staff
• Set your employees' work schedules
• Sync Timetastic with your own calendar: Calendar feeds: ical / webcal
• Archive and delete leavers: Users: delete / archive / removing