Administer work plans

Work plans should be set up for all working patterns in your business. You can choose to create a work plan manually, or if the work plan is 4 weeks or less you can download a pre-set Excel template from People Manager, fill out the plan and upload this back into the system. All work plans are based on a 24-hour clock with start and finish times entered as hh:mm. Break times are entered as a length of time. We recommend not amending an existing work plan as this can impact previous absence and entitlements for your employees. Instead create a new work plan and assign this to an employee. Go to absence - work plan tab to see how to assign the work plan to a particular employee.


Click on Admin in your top menu bar and within the absence section click on administer work plans.

Creating a work plan manually 

 Click new and a panel will open on the righthand side. 

Give the plan a name and enter the full-time hours equivalent, then tick the box if this is term time only. 

Work plans must be added in full weeks, if this shift pattern spans over multiple weeks simply click the add a week button at the bottom of the screen. On each day enter the start, finish times and break duration, or if it is a non-working day leave the fields blank. On the days that have start and finish times, you will see the work/rest column will change accordingly. The day length will also prepopulate based on the start, finish and break times. 

You can enter time either by clicking in the field and manually typing, or by click on the clock and scrolling through the number options. Break times are the length of the employee's break. For example, 1 hour for lunch needs to be entered as 01:00. 

Click save. 

Downloading & uploading a work plan

Click on admin on your menu bar, and within the absence section click on administer work plans, then click on download template. This will download an Excel spreadsheet. 

The template headers should not be changed at all, simply fill out the fields you require. You can hover over red triangles in the corners of fields, and you will see an explanation appear. 

Shift-time rules

Start and end times must be in the hh:mm format and the cells have been preformulated. For example, the start time would be 09:00 for 9am and end time would be 18:00 for 6pm. Start times cannot be later than the end time. 

Breaks are for a period of time, in hours and minutes. For example, 1 hour break is shown as 01:00. A break time cannot be longer than the day's shift duration. 

Any time fields that are left blank will be automatically uploaded as 00:00 

Any full weeks with nothing in the time fields will all be populated with 00:00 and removed by the system, once completed save your file.

Go to administer work plans, click upload work plans and select the file you wish to upload.

You will see a green successful message at the bottom right-hand corner of your screen and the new work plan will be added to your list. 

Click on the plan and the righthand panel will appear showing you all the data, you have imported. We recommend you check this before assigning this plan to an employee. If you do not wish to keep this plan you can click delete. Please remember to only do this if you have not assigned this work plan to any employee.