This is step 1 of 5 of the implementation module Attendances and Absences.

Learn how to create work schedules, where you define how your employees' vacation time, overtime, and deficit hours will be calculated.

What are the benefits?

• Record the days of the week and the hours that your employees work within Personio.
• Correctly calculate vacation and track overtime in Personio.
• Days that are not defined as working days are not considered to be days off when calculating, for example, vacation or sickness periods.
• Correctly calculate overtime and deficit hours. Use work schedules to define the required working hours when tracking overtime and deficit hours.
• If you are tracking overtime and deficit hours within work schedules, you can choose to either pay out overtime or convert it into time off for your employees. Learn more about Managing overtime.

Step 1: Define work schedules

To set up work schedules, you first need to think about how many different work schedules you have in your company.

Tip
To define the different work schedules, you can ask yourself the following questions:
▶︎ Do we have any part-time employees?
▶︎ Are there part-time employees who only work specific days, and on which days do they work? (for example, Mondays and Tuesdays).

See our Excel template (at the bottom) for help on possible work schedules. Note that this is not intended for the import, but only to ensure you don't forget a possible work schedule.

When defining work schedules, you also need to take into consideration the following concepts, and how they are managed in your company:

Step 2: Create a work schedule

Once you have defined the different types of work schedules for your company, you can start setting them up. To create a new work schedule, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Work Hours and Absences > Attendance.
2. Under Working Hour Schedules, click into the field Add schedule, and give your work schedule a meaningful name (such as, full-time; 40 hours; Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri with time tracking).
3. Click  to create the work schedule and navigate to the work schedule settings.
4. Working days and hours: To define the working days and hours, insert how many hours your employees are supposed to work on each working day, and how long their breaks are.
   
   

   Note
   Entering the start and end times is optional and subsequently only serves as a guideline. Employees can record attendance outside the specified start and end times.

5. Track Overtime & Deficit Hours  (optional): To track overtime, select Yes.
   ▶︎ Then select if overtime should be calculated on a daily or weekly basis.
   ▶︎ Under Overtime cliff, you can select if there is a specific number of overtime hours that is already included in the monthly salary and should therefore be disregarded in the overtime calculation.
   ▶︎ If the overtime is calculated on a daily basis, you can select to Track deficit hours.
   ▶︎ Select if deficit hours should be tracked for days with no time tracked.
   
   

   Note
   If you activate to track deficit hours for days with no time tracked, deficit hours will start getting generated straight away. That is why we recommend that:
   
   ▶︎ you only activate automatic deficit hours once your employees are actively tracking hours.
   ▶︎ you select Create duplicate working schedule when saving the work schedule, to save the updates on a copy of the work schedule that will be automatically assigned to the same employees.

6. Break rules (optional): Select if employees and approvers should be informed if an employee enters incorrect breaks in the time-tracking.
   
   

   Note
   You can add up to two rules with the break time required for a specific amount of working hours.

7. Absences: To prorate the absence entitlement, select Yes. Then select a reference value to prorate the absence entitlement from the drop-down-menu.
8. Then click Save Work Schedule.

You can find further information on setting up work schedules for part-time employees in the article Set up part-time employment.

Example: Full-time or part-time with fixed working days and fixed vacation days

In the following example, we assume the company has three types of employees who all receive 24 vacation days per year:

• Employee type A works full-time, with a 5-day (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri), 40-hour week
• Employee type B works part-time, with a 3-day (Mon, Tue, Thu), 24-hour week
• Employee type C works part-time, with a 3-day (Mon, Tue, Wed), 20-hour week

For each employee type, you need to create a separate work schedule under Settings > Work Hours & Absences > Attendance, which you then assign to the relevant employees. Give the work schedules names that make them easily be identifiable (such as part-time, 20 hours (Mon, Tue, Thu, Fri)).

Employee A (Full-Time)	Employee B (Part-Time)	Employee C (Part-Time)
How many vacation days does the employee receive on January 1?
5/5 × 24 = 24	3/5 × 24 = 14.4	3/5 × 20 = 12
Example 1: Assuming all of these employees request vacation from Sun to Sat
-5 vacation days	-3 vacation days	-3 vacation days
Example 2: Assuming all of these employees request vacation from Sun to Wed
-3 vacation days	-2 vacation days	-3 vacation days
Example 3: Assuming all of these employees request vacation from Wed to Sat
-3 vacation days	-1 vacation day (Thu)	-1 vacation day (Wed)

Step 3: Assign work schedules

Once you have configured the work schedules, the next step is to select which schedule should be the default work schedule, and assign the other schedules to the appropriate employees either individually or in bulk.

Note
Leave entitlements are recalculated if you assign a new work schedule after the entitlement has been granted (usually on January 1st).

Default work schedule

Under Settings > Work Hours and Absences > Attendance, you can select a work schedule, usually the 40-hour schedule, to be the Default work schedule that is assigned to all employees by default.

Note
If you don't make one of the schedules your default schedule, Personio will automatically assign the first work schedule in your list as the default one for all employees.

Assign work schedules individually

To assign the appropriate work schedule to an individual employee, follow these steps:

1. Go to Employee profile > Attendance.
2. Click on the Work hours & schedule widget to open the Employee work schedule page.

3. Click Change schedule to open the Change schedule? window.

4. Select the desired start date and also the relevant work schedule from the dropdown menu.

5. Click Submit.
   
   

Bulk-edit work schedules

You can use bulk editing to assign the appropriate work schedule to various employees at the same time. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Employee list, and use the checkboxes to flag all the employees who are to be assigned the same work schedule.
2. Then click on Actions and select Assign or remove work schedule.
3. Choose the appropriate work schedule and decide from which date on this schedule should be applied.
4. Then click Submit.
   
   

Step 4: Create projects for project-based time tracking (optional)

If employees track the time they worked on specific projects, you can create projects and activate project-based time tracking. To create projects, follow these steps:

1. Go to Settings > Work Hours and Absences > Attendance.
2. Under Projects, click into the field Add project, and enter the name of your project.
3. Then click  .
4. To record the specific hours that you worked for a project, select the Available for attendance tracking checkbox. Projects with time tracking activated are flagged by a checkmark placed in front of the project name.

Learn more about how to Set up and use project-based time tracking.

Next step

Note
Check if everything is set up correctly in Quality check: Attendance before moving on to the next step.