WHAT SHOULD I KEEP IN MIND BEFORE STARTING A VACATION BID?

Before starting a vacation bid, there are a few steps below that you should keep in mind to ensure an easy and streamlined bidding process:

  • The schedule template must be generated for the range of dates that the employees will be allowed to bid for, before the vacation bid is set up and started. This is required because once a bidding round is processed and closed, the bid awards are written automatically to the generated dynamic schedule.
  • The vacation bid’s Schedule Start date must match the start date for the specific shift (of the employees that are participating in that vacation bid) on the schedule template. For example, if a fire department who works in 24 hour shifts is setting up a vacation bid for Shift C, then the bid administrator will need to make sure to set the Schedule Start to the first date on the fire department’s generated schedule template where Shift C begins (i.e. the overall fire schedule template may begin on 1/1 but Shift C may not work until 1/3, so the Schedule Start date should be 1/3).

 

  • Please note that the Schedule Start does not take into consideration any user schedule changes that may be set up for the future on a generated schedule template. In other words, user schedules need to have the same shift pattern for the entire date range in which they will be allowed to submit vacation bids. This is because the Vacation Bidding module uses the default pattern of the user schedule to generate the bidding segments, and to inform the user of the exact days that are available according to when they actually work.

 

If you do have users with changing or multiple user schedules, you may need to run vacation bids for smaller date ranges, so that you can ensure the users have the same user schedule for the entire date range. For example, if the fire department users have user schedules that rotate quarterly, you would want to create a quarterly vacation bid.