SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Time Off – Floating Holidays

Holidays 

Yes, you read that right. This blog is on our all-time favourite topic – HOLIDAYS.

We must have come across different holiday requirements from our client. I came too, which is as follows:

Requirement – Organization has a list of ten full-day holidays. Out of ten, the employee is eligible to take only two. He should not be able to apply on any other day except the list of ten holidays already defined by the organization. Also, these ten holidays should be visible to the employee on the calendar (on Time-off UI) and are not carried forward to next year. (These are generally called as floating holidays / restricted holidays/optional holidays)

Let us first understand what are floating holidays.

Floating holidays are the list of holidays that an employee is entitled to take up to a certain limit. For example., the organization decides a list of ten floating holidays before the start of a new fiscal year and declares it to his employees with a condition that they can avail any two out of ten. The dates for floating holiday changes every year (for eg. a holiday X happens to be on 11^th May in the year 2016 and on 19^th May in the year 2017).

While using SuccessFactors TimeOff functionality all the predefined leaves including national holidays and weekends are clearly visible on the calendar indicating the name of the national holiday or the non-working days. Employees cannot mark these holidays as their working day (unless your Manager is !). For including floating holidays on the calendar I got to know about SAP that it is not possible to have floating days on the calendar view while the employee is applying for leaves. So while working on leaves I got a workaround which might be useful while configuring floating leaves.

Techie Talks:

Let us first understand the technical perspectives to achieve our goal. Here I have explained the basic steps to be followed:

 Creating a new holiday:

Go to Manage Time Off Structures / Manage Data and on right side of Create New search for Holiday. Write down the name of floating holiday which will appear on the calendar and after finished click on Save. You can create all the floating holidays from here or you can import them using Import and Export Data.

 Assigning Holiday to Holiday Calendar:

Assign holidays that you have created in the first step to your existing or new holiday calendar. But this time instead of using Full or Half in holiday class, choose NONE.

 Creating Time Account Type and Time Type:

Once holiday calendar is created, you have to create a new Time Account Type with all the rules as per the organization’s standard and assign it to Time Type. Below is an example of Time Type I have created:

In this time type, as you can see I have attached a rule under Take Rules which restricts the user to apply for floating holiday other than the designated ones.

Please find below the “CPU” of my blog:

In our example, we have taken 11^th August 2017 and 30^th August 2017 as the floating holidays. This is now visible on the calendar (UI) highlighted with an asterisk sign on white background. So when the user tried to take leave on 12^th September 2017 from Floating holiday account, system threw an error (you can customize the error message as per requirement):

While if he takes this holiday either on 11^th August or 30^th August, the system does not throw any error and he can apply only for these two days with Floating holiday account.

Hurray!! Now you can go ahead and apply for your leave

I have tried explaining in detail wherever I can. There could be multiple ways to tackle this kind of requirement, I came out of this approach. Still, if you find something not in accordance with the system or something that can be fine-tuned, your inputs are warmly welcomed.