System Settings - Best Practice

Overview

This guide will help you understand why system settings are so important and what they control in the edays system.   

What are the System Settings?

System settings include all the high-level configuration which can be configured alongside other areas of the system. 

Flexibility of System Settings?

The system settings can be configured on globally and some options can be overridden on a sub-set of users (using templates) and on a user level. Please see the below table:

Key: X = Yes

*Allow user(s) to change password and Force user(s) to change password can be configured on a user and template level. The options for the password strengths or timeouts can only be set globally. 

Functionality of System Settings?

For the system settings, you will see a host of different options which have been defined below:

Password settings:

Allows to setup password rules for users logging into the system:

• Minimum password length – Set the minimum length the password needs to be.
• Password must be mixed case – Does the password require being lowercase and uppercase.
• Password must contain special characters – Does the password require special characters such as exclamation mark (!) and under score (_).
• Maximum invalid password attempts – How many times can the password be added before the system locks the user out. 
• Allow remember me – Allows for the user to save their password in the web browser, so they don’t need to add the username and password on each time they access the system. 
• Login timeout – If the system has been in active then how long will the system log the user out.
• Allow user(s) to change password – Give the ability for user to change their own password via the front end of the system.
• Force user(s) to change password – Forces users to change their passwords after a certain number of days.

If SSO has been configured for your organisation, then the above settings can be ignored. 

Format settings:

General settings which can be configured to match the organisation’s location:

• Language – Set the language edays should be in
• Time zone – Allows to set the time zone for the organisation or different regions in the organisation, this is used for the edays synch to your Outlook or Gmail calendars to set the absences to the correct times. 
• Date format – Allows to set the date format for the organisation or region, I.e., MM/DD/YYYY for the US. 
• Date separator – Set the separators to dots, slashes, or dashes.
• Leave year day – Day of when a user’s leave year beings.
• Leave year month – Month of when a user’s leave year beings.
• Hours per day – Set the default working hours for your organisation
• Report download CSV column delimiter - Depending on how your Excel (or software of choice) is configured, you can change the way edays downloads the information. 

User view settings:

Allow to specify the different visibility settings for all users, a sub-set of users or individual user on the below settings:

• Admin user view
• Staff records user view
• Calendar user view
• Reporting user view
• Directory user view (if you have Employee Directory enabled

Absence settings:

Settings to enable additional options on absence requesting, restricting and visibility. 

• Allow manual day calculation by authoriser
• Allow manual day calculation by user 
• Disable next-year booking – Allows restricting bookings for next year within the current year, mainly used to be fair to all users at the beginning of their calendar year. 
• Override display time unit for absences – Allows to change the visibility on the front end of the system to show absence types booked in days as hours and vice versa.  
• Full day bookings always equal 1 day – If users book more than half of their configured working hours, then this setting will at all times amend the booking to be a full day. Useful in configurations where Monday to Thursday are full working hours while Friday is a shorter day, for example.
• Hide times for day bookings – Only applicable to hours users and will default to show the start and end time of the booking. However, if enabled and a user books a full working day it will show as a full day on the tooltip rather than the start and end time. 

Carry-over settings:

Associated to the holiday entitlement carry overrules and allows enabling the form to show on the front end of the system. If the manual carry over options have been enabled for a relevant entitlement pot, selecting one of the options below allows users to submit a carry over request on the Front end:

• Enable entitlement carry-over for planned entitlements. 
• Enable entitlement carry-over for unplanned entitlements.
• Enable entitlement transfers for Overtime and TOIL entitlements.

Bradford settings/alerts:

The Bradford factor is a formula used by HR departments to calculate the impact of employees' absences on the organisation. The below options allow for the Bradford Factor to be enabled and configured based on your organisation’s requirements.

Bradford Factor alias – Allows to change the name of the Bradford Factor.

Show others' Bradford Factor – Allows showing the Bradford Factor on a user profile for authoriser and others who have the permission to do so.  

Show own Bradford Factor – Allows users to see their Own Bradford Factor score. 

Show Bradford Factor occurrence detail – Show the occurrences of unplanned absences.

Show Bradford Factor meter – Visual representation of the Bradford Factor.

Alerts can also be setup based on the Bradford Factor levels and if a user has hit a certain Bradford Factor score. Emails can be triggered to the user or authoriser on next steps. 

Note: An email address for the HR contact is required before the BF alert can be setup.

Authorisation settings:

Additional options to support the standard authorisation process within edays. With any of the below settings enabled, when placing a request, users can specify who the approval of that request needs to go to. 

• Enable manual authorisation for planned absences
• Enable manual authorisation for unplanned absence
• Enable manual authorisation for Overtime and TOIL

The list will show all the authorisers in the system and the request will instead go to the select authoriser rather than the default authoriser which is set on the user's record in the admin panel. 

Enable delegation – Gives the ability for all authorisers to delegate their authorisation for a set period. This can be for all types if absence types or a subset. This is normally used when individual authorisers are seconded to another department. 

Email settings:

Additional email triggers to assist with making administrators aware of open absence and data change requests. 

• Email addresses to receive open absence alerts – Email sent to the ‘HR contact’ when users are above 7 days of open absence. It will also trigger an email when an open absence hits an already booked absence in the system for a particular user.
• Email addresses to receive data change requests – Email sent to the ‘HR contact’ if a user request to see all their data and feel the data stored is inaccurate.

HR contact settings:

Details on the key HR contact, which is used for the above options and marketing/account communications from edays.

• Main HR contact name
• Main HR contact email
• Main HR contact phone

Leaver settings:

You can now amend the leaver proration and retention settings with the below settings:

• Prorate Leaver Calculations By (Day / Week / Month) 
• Leaver proration rounding policy
• Leaver retention period

Employee Benefits settings:

Allows for the ability to add a link to an employee benefits portal your organisation may be using. This option will show on the front-end navigation bar.

• Employee benefits link text
• Employee benefits link URL

Additional settings:

Additional options which may be used by organisations:

• Enable monthly sign off – Enables an option for the Czech Republic, if this is something which you would require, please contact the support team for more information. 
• Enable NHS wellbeing section – Enables the wellbeig section with health advice supplied by the NHS and allows admins to create defined reasons which provide users with links to information on conditions supplied by the NHS.

Our video on the configuration and example configuration can be found here: https://www.e-days.com/learning-centre-overview/3-system-setup