The form app is ideal for digitalizing analog vacation requests. Colleagues who want to request their vacation complete the corresponding form in Haiilo and then their managers receive an e-mail notification, allowing them to quickly and easily approve the vacation.

Depending on the size of the company, it is recommended to integrate one form app per department into the team community. This ensures that the requests are sent straight to the right person and don’t have to be forwarded.

As an additional overview, you can also integrate a list app into the team community and enter all of the team members’ vacation days into it.

Which settings should you apply in the form app?

When creating the app, the name should be allocated (here: "Vacation request") and the app should be set to Active.

The notifications can be deactivated in this case as the responsible colleagues are informed about the requests by e-mail. It is also important that you set in the second tab, "Email notifications," which users should be notified by e-mail about new submissions in the form. Here we recommend selecting the manager who approves the vacation.

You can use the following fields:

• Users: Those who want to take the vacation.
• Options: Selection field for the type of vacation. This could be
  • Paid/unpaid vacation
  • Special leave
  • Educational leave
  • Time off in lieu
  • ...
• Options: As an additional field if "special leave" as selected in the previous field.
• Date: Start of vacation
• Date: End of vacation
• Text: for any additional comments

The additional vacation overview

In addition to the form app, you can manage all of the vacations in the team using the list app to keep the team informed at an early stage. You can use the following fields:

• Users: Those who are taking the vacation.
• Date: Start of vacation
• Date: End of vacation
• Checkbox: Has the vacation already been approved or it is still being planned?
• Text: for comments

The colleagues can apply their own sorting in the list app, e.g. filter by name to see their own vacation entries or sort by date to see all vacations in chronological order.

You have two options here for maintaining the list: 

1. Only the manager who approves the vacation can add entries to the list.
2. The colleagues must enter themselves in this list alongside submitting the form and the manager sets the checkbox to green if the vacation has been approved.

It’s important here that the permissions to edit the list entries have been set accordingly.

• Normal users can no longer edit their contribution after their initial submission as it could otherwise be unclear who had set the green check mark to "Approved".
• Optional: Normal users cannot delete their entries themselves. The manager could lose sight of the overview if changes were made and then people forgot to inform the manager of this.