WhosOff Coordinating Office Vacations Online
If you’ve got a small office or have a human resources app that doesn’t cover vacation planning to coordinate vacation schedules, you’ll want to see WhosOff.com. This site acts as the scheduling tool that many higher-end (and expensive) human resources applications use to facilitate vacation planning coordination.
Keeping track of employees, when they want to take vacation, and ensuring that enough staff is always on hand to keep the business running while they go used to be a complicated task requiring accountant-like skills at bookkeeping and graph drawing. The introduction of computers intelligent enough to do this for you, of course, changed all that. They’ve come a long way, though, from the old calendar days where everyone marked their hoped-for vacation time and crossed their fingers that someone with more seniority wouldn’t swoop in and override them.
While in-and-out boards are available all over the place to track who’s in the office, who isn’t, or even who’s on vacation and who isn’t, not many of them have the ability to actually schedule and track future events. Most that can have limited capability as to what they can and can’t track.
WhosOff tracks not only who wants what time off, when they want it off, etc., but it also makes sure that when they try to schedule that time off, they actually have it coming to them. With fairly sophisticated (but simple to use) tools, the human resources manager can tell the app how vacation time accrues (annually, monthly, etc.) and how much builds up each time.
Requests for time off are emailed to managers for verification and signoff and then automatically scheduled and the employee is notified upon approval. The initial setup of an office takes a fair amount of time, of course. All of those employees must be given access to the system, all of their info must be input by HR, etc. Once it’s up and running, though, you’ll likely wonder how you did without it.
It’s a decidedly English-centered site, being based in the UK, and some of the phraseology makes this obvious (the use of “holiday” instead of “vacation” for instance). Nevertheless, it’s a well-functioning tool that anyone can use to build their office vacation pool.
Two versions exist: one free, one paid. The free version has plenty of functionality and isn’t limited except for reporting aspects and some of the extended leave types and extra plug-ins. The paid version, for instance, integrates with MS Outlook’s calender (through an insert) and more. Prices for the paid version are based on user counts (by employee).
WhosOff has been running for over two years and currently boasts 45,000 users worldwide. WhosOff is owned by X:drive Computing Ltd in Canterbury, England.
