A flexible, configurable system for tracking leave, absence, and other people-related data across your workspace.
Trellis provides you with a highly robust system for managing leave and absence across your company.
Tip
HR teams will love it for its flexible and configurable settings that mould to your business context and tracking needs.
Managers and employees will love it for its easy-to-use functionality and the visibility it provides.
Features at a glance
- Employees see colleague leave conflicts when booking their leave to assist resourcing issues
- A customisable admin approval process for requested leave
- The ability to collect documentation around leave types such as extended sick leave
- A fully downloadable audit trail of all leave and absence — perfect for managing those with specific visa restrictions
- A timeline of the whole team's leave, with suggested dates when everyone is free
- Due to its flexible nature, you can also use our leave and absence system to track a whole variety of other data related to your teams. For example, if customers and clients sometimes provide great feedback about a particular employee, you can create an absence type called Commendation, configure it accordingly, and allow admins to record all commendations each person receives — great for end-of-month or quarter appraisals and incentive scheme tracking.
Managing absence as an administrator
Absence is managed across five separate screens. Start with Absence types — everything downstream reads from it:
- Absence types — your management of leave and absence should begin here. Establish all the types of absence and leave you need to track across your team. The settings available let you adjust the ways in which each leave type functions and how it appears to workspace members.
- Allocation — allocate absence types to workspace members as a group or individually to accommodate your organisation's policies. You can also adjust the allocated leave per member — for example, to give someone time off in lieu, or to correct their total allocation in case of misadministration.
- Requests — review all leave requested by workspace members, make decisions on whether to grant or deny requested leave, or request documentation from the requesting employee.
- All absence — shows administrators all leave and absence, including historic entries. Admins can download a CSV for offline use or auditing purposes.
- Leave calendar — a timeline of everyone's leave, covered below. It sits under Resourcing in the sidebar rather than in the HR section.
The leave calendar
Leave calendar shows the whole team's leave on one timeline: one row per person, one column per day. It covers last leave year, this one, and next, so you can look back at what was taken and ahead at what's booked. If your leave year isn't set in calendar configuration, it uses calendar years instead.
Each leave is a bar coloured by its absence type, with a legend above the timeline. Pending leave is striped, so you can tell it from approved leave at a glance. Hover a bar for the detail — the person, absence type, dates, number of days, and status. Bars are for reading only; to change a leave, use Requests or All absence.
Weekends and bank holidays are shaded in the day header (hover a bank holiday to see its name), and a line marks today. People who have left the workspace but still have leave in the period are listed with a Former badge.
Only leave on absence types with Deduct from user resource and timesheet switched on appears here — see Absence types. Viewers aren't listed, since they don't book leave.
Finding your way around
- Search people — narrow the timeline to people whose name matches.
- Today — scroll back to today.
- Day, Week, Month — zoom the timeline in or out.
- The filter button has five tabs: People, Projects (people on those projects), Absence type, Status (Approved, Pending, Cancellation requested), and Display, which holds Hide people with no leave. Absence type and Status are for Owners and Admins only.
Your search, filters, and zoom are added to the page URL, so you can share or bookmark the view.
Suggesting a time when everyone's free
Suggest time finds the next stretch of working days when none of the people you're looking at are off — useful for scheduling a team event, a workshop, or a big push on a project.
Suggestions start from today and look as far as the end of next leave year. Weekends and bank holidays are skipped. Any approved, pending, or cancellation-requested leave blocks a day, whatever the Absence type and Status filters are set to. For Editors and Members, only approved and cancellation-requested leave counts, since they don't see pending requests. If someone's leave changes so the suggestion is no longer free, Trellis moves it to the next free time and tells you.
Initial leave and absence setup
To help you get up and running quickly, Trellis comes with a preset pack of standard UK leave types. You can choose whether to enable these or create your own custom leave types.
Note
Getting your leave set up is much easier if you've already fully completed your workspace configuration and members have complete member profiles. That's because leave and absence functionality makes some calculations based on employee contract start date (for allocating pro-rata leave) and your workspace's regular hours of business.
The Leave calendar is open to Owners, Admins, Editors and Members. Editors and Members see everyone's approved leave, but not pending requests. Other people's leave shows as Leave without its absence type, and their own leave is named only when its type is one members are allowed to see. Members can filter by projects they're on. Contributors and Viewers can't open the Leave calendar.
The rest of the Leave and absence admin area is restricted to Owners and Admins. Editors and Members can request their own leave via My leaves, and Contributors and Viewers don't interact with the leave system directly. Detailed permissions for each admin sub-tab live on their individual pages.