(This article ran in our newsletter several years ago, but with the end of the year approaching, it's still relevant.)

Setting up holiday schedules in the TimePilot software is pretty straightforward, but there are some things you can do that will get the job done more quickly and efficiently.

When you installed the TimePilot Central software, you created one or more holiday schedules and then assigned one to each employee.

Now, each time you start TimePilot Central, the software looks at your holiday schedule(s) and determines if a holiday has occurred since the last time the software was started. If a holiday has occurred, the software then runs down the list of employees, looking for those with a holiday schedule that includes that holiday. When it finds one, it inserts into the employee’s record the number of hours you specified when you set up the schedule.

So how can you handle your holiday schedules more efficiently? Here are a few suggestions:

• It’s tempting to label your holiday schedules something like “Salaried Holidays 2019” or “Hourly Holidays 2019.” That’s a very clear way to do it, but by making the schedules specific to certain years, you’re going to have to create new ones every year (“Salaried Holidays 2020,” “Salaried Holidays 2021,” “Salaried Holidays 2022,” etc.) And then you’ll have to go through every employee’s profile every year to assign them that year’s holiday schedule. That’s too much work!
  
  Make it easy on yourself by giving your holiday schedules generic names like “Salaried Holiday Schedule" or “Hourly Holiday Schedule.” Then all you have to do at the end of the year is return to that schedule and change the dates of the upcoming year's holidays. Handling it this way lets you avoid the drudgery of changing each employee's profile, as you would if you had created a schedule named after a year (for instance, "Salaried Holidays 2018.") Where in the software do you change the schedules? In TimePilot Central, click “Setup,” then “Holiday Setup,” then highlight the schedule you want to change and click “Edit a Holiday Schedule.”
  
  
• Want to save even more time? When you're entering your holiday schedule in the TimePilot software, you'll see slots for 20 holidays. Most companies don’t have 20 holidays in a single year. (If your company does, please let us know!) After you fill in your holidays for the upcoming year, keep going and fill the remaining slots with the holidays for the following year, too.
  
  
• What happens if you realize on Monday, December 31, just before extracting your pay period, that you've forgotten to include Christmas as a holiday on your schedule? You could insert the holiday time for every employee, but that's probably quite time-consuming. A simpler choice would be to add the missing holiday to the holiday schedule and then use TimePilot’s “Check Holiday Transactions” feature. This feature looks at your holiday schedules and at your Current Transactions and adds missing holiday transactions. Here's how to use it:
  
  
1. First, add the missing holiday to your holiday schedule(s) and save it (TimePilot Central > “Setup” menu > “Holiday Setup” > Click the schedule you want to change > “Edit a Holiday Schedule”), make the changes and click "Save." The date will show up in red, because it's in the past. That's OK.
   
   
2. Next, start "Check Holiday Transactions" (TimePilot Central > “Edit” menu > “Check Holiday Transactions”).
   
   
3. In the box that pops up, click the down arrow and choose a date that occurs just before the date of the holiday you just entered in Step 1. In the example above, you might choose December 23.
   
   
4. Click OK. The software will inspect the newly changed holiday schedule, see that the December 25 holiday is missing from the appropriate employees' work hours in Current Transactions and insert the missing transactions where needed automatically.

Bonus item:

All About Holiday Bonuses

If you have the Professional or Enterprise Edition of the TimePilot software, you can set it to reward an employee with a bonus in dollars. To do this, you'll use the "Insert Pay" function. Here's how:

Start TimePilot Central, then click the "Edit" menu and choose "Insert Pay." (If you want to reward them with extra hours of pay, you can use the "Insert Time" function.) You'll specify the employee and the amount of his or her bonus. You can also specify the time and date of the bonus as well as the location, shift, department and company where the employee was working when they earned the bonus. There's a place to add a note, too.

A transaction will be created for the employee in Current Transactions. A dollar sign will appear in the first column of the Transaction List to signal that a transaction is a bonus. To see the amount of the bonus, make sure you have a heading called "+Pay." To do so, right-click the green row of headers in the Transaction List and check the box next to "+Pay" in the list that appears.

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