Here you can, among other things, compensate overtime hours if these, for example, have been paid out, and flexibly create absence and leave reasons that are to be made available to your employees.

The module provides you with the following additional menu items in your ZEP:

If you use the Absences & Overtime module, you must first make a few basic settings in your ZEP instance.

You can find these under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings.

Here you can make General Settings, settings for Absence Requests, Reports, and Remaining Vacation & Surcharges. To do this, either click the pen and paper icon next to the bold headings or the button Change Settings.

Specify here the month from which the Absences, Overtime, and Vacation module was introduced in ZEP.

Specify the Overtime from the previous year and the Vacation Entitlement for the current financial year for each individual employee in Employee Administration (currently means from the introduction of the add-on module).

You should perform the Month-end Closing regularly starting from this date.

Specify the month in which your Financial Year ends. This date affects the timing of the employee's Vacation Entitlement if you enter the following in the Vacation Year setting: "Annual Vacation Entitlement always at the start of a financial year."

You can customize the text of the email under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Mail Templates. The corresponding mail template is titled "Notification for excessive overtime hours per day."

Recipients of requests for approval of absences

Absence Reasons requiring approval can only be approved by Administrators or, with the Locations & Departments module, by Department Managers. Employees can submit an application for approval of absences via email.

Specify who should receive the employee's vacation request via email. In most cases, this will be the Administrator so they can approve the requests. Additionally, you can enter any number of further recipient addresses (e.g., HR personnel), separated by spaces, commas, or semicolons (depending on the setting under Administration > My Company > E-Mail). Furthermore, the request is always also sent to the recipients explicitly specified in the mail template in the master data.

Here, Department Managers and Department Managers of superior departments are also available as recipients for selection. This setting applies to all departments if you do not make other settings at the department level. (See Department Data: Overtime, Absences, Vacation for department-specific settings.)

Request Recipient & Remark Pre-filling

You can additionally specify whether employees are allowed to view and edit the recipients of the Absence Request email when applying for their absences.

Furthermore, you can pre-fill a text that is displayed in the remark of the Absence Request. This text is only a default setting and can be edited by every employee in their Absence Request.

Approving and Changing Absences

Additionally, you can determine whether only an Administrator may change approved Absences, and whether a Department Manager (only with the Locations & Departments module) may approve their own Absences.

Contractually Compensated Overtime Hours

This setting is relevant if you have employees in your company whose employment contract contains a regulation on Overtime Hours Compensated by Contract.

In this case, you can set the option deduct inclusive overtime from monthly hour balance to active under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings, as it is inactive by default.

If you have activated this setting, you can specify a value and a calculation type (hours or percentage) for the Overtime Hours Compensated by Salary per month as a default setting for new employees under Administration > Employees > Settings. These values are then automatically adopted for newly created employees.

In the menu item Regular Working Time of a selected employee, you can individually adjust the default setting.

Monthly Calculation of Compensated Overtime Hours

Up to x (setting per employee) overtime hours per month are considered as "overtime hours compensated by salary," meaning they are deducted from the overtime balance.

Thus, no more than x is compensated per month, and no more than the overtime hours actually worked.

No surcharge is applied for deficit hours. If an employee records time off in lieu during that month, resulting in deficit hours in that one month, this has no effect, even if a deduction occurred or will occur in an earlier or later month.

Example 1:

An employee has a contract with 40 regular working hours per month plus 10 overtime hours compensated by salary. If they work 9 overtime hours in September, these 9 hours are recorded as compensated by salary.

Example 2:

If they work 13 overtime hours in September, 10 are recorded as compensated by salary, meaning 3 overtime hours remain.

Example 3:

In October, the target working time is 107 hours. The employee has booked 95 hours of working time (because they took the rest as time off in lieu). This results in a deficit of 12 hours. No automated compensation is recorded whatsoever.

Current Month up to and including current day

You can activate the option here as a default setting to set the current day as the end of the period in the Reports Employees > Month-end Report, Time Verification Overview, Working Time Overview, and (when using the Locations & Departments module) the Reports Department > Reports > Times as the end of the period. If you call up one of these Reports, the current day is specified as the period end in the default setting of the period. This means the calculation of the current month's overtime hours occurs up to and including the current day.

Message if the last month-end closing is older than this number of months

If you regularly perform Month-end Closings, you have the assurance that employees can no longer change the times for the relevant month. Furthermore, some Reports will be faster.

A note is displayed in these Reports if the last Month-end Closing is long overdue. Set here after how many months the note should be displayed. The number must be between 1 and 12.

Show overtime remainder in 'My ZEP

Specify whether employees are allowed to view their current Overtime Balance under Reports in the Absence Calendar, the Month-end Report, and the Time Verification Overview.

show remarks to balanced holidays + absenteeism in the month-end evaluation

If you want your employees to see in ZEP why overtime hours or vacation days were compensated, you can optionally set this here. If you specify "Yes" here, employees will see the remark you entered when compensating overtime hours/vacation days under Employees > Compensation Overtime, Vacation in their Month-end Report.

Pay total of all payable hours (work, paid absence, annual holiday, holidays) in addition to overtime account

If you check the box here, the following Reports change:

An employee must at least have 'User add. authorizations' access permission in order to view the absences overview for all employees in 'My ZEP > Reports'

If you activate the checkbox, employees who have the User role cannot see this report. If you do not check the box here, all employees can see the Absence Overview.

Residual holiday from an elapsed year that is not taken will automatically expire at month-end closing

Optionally specify if and when remaining vacation from the expired Vacation Year automatically expires during Month-end Closing.

If the setting is changed retroactively, nothing changes for the months that have already been closed.

Supplements
​List supplements for holidays and special times as time surcharges and add to the overtime account

If you do not check the box, surcharges entered under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Public Holidays are reported in the Month-end Report. They are not converted into Time Surcharges.

With the box checked:

Calculate and display Overtime and Time Surcharges

If you have employees who should not be credited with Overtime and Time Surcharges (if applicable) because Overtime is included in their salary or because they are freelancers and are paid according to their hours worked, then you can set whether Overtime and Time Surcharges should be calculated and reported for this employee in the Data section for every employee by clicking the pen-and-paper symbol.

For employees for whom the calculation of Overtime (and Time Surcharges, if applicable) is switched off, the tables and information related to Overtime and Time Surcharges will be hidden in the Reports.

Under Administration > Employees > Settings, you will find the option to make Default Settings for vacation days, absence days, and contractually compensated overtime hours for new employees. To do this, click the Change Settings button and switch to the Default Settings for new employees tab.

This setting is primarily relevant for part-time employees:

For full-time employees who have the same Regular Working Time every day, this setting makes no difference, unless the full-time employee has different numbers of hours of Regular Working Time on different weekdays, and less vacation should be used for the shorter working days.

For (freelance) employees with Regular Working Time 0, only the setting correspond to calendar days is suitable. And conversely: With the setting convert according to regular working time, it no longer makes sense to define working days with Regular Working Time 0.

By using the Absences & Overtime module, you gain the ability to make further entries in ZEP. These are the submenu items Absence Reasons, Mail Templates, and Special Times, which you can find under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings.

The Absence Reasons can be found under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Reasons for Absence

.

There are five categories of Absence Reasons that differ as follows:

If you have set the option Time recording possible on full absence day = No under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings, this setting does NOT apply to the Absence Reason category "Absence Documentation" (the setting applies to all other categories). Absence Documentation does not block the booking of time, and vice versa.

The Absence Reasons of the category "Absence Documentation" are visible to all employees, regardless of their permissions. (Background: employees can see that a colleague is doing Home Office, for example, and is therefore not physically present but is still reachable by phone, for instance.) The Absence Reasons of the category "Absence Documentation" can also be entered in the calendar on weekends, public holidays, and non-working days.

You can select a color for every Absence Reason, in which the Absence Reason is displayed in the calendar. Please note: only an Administrator or Controller can see these colors and thus the different Absence Reasons in Reports.

You can rename the Short Form of the Absence Reason: click the pen symbol next to the short form in the Absence Reasons overview, enter the new Short Form, and save it.

You can store Absence Reasons in multiple languages.

The entry is made in the Designation field: click "German," enter the German designation for the Short Form; click "English," enter the English designation; click "French," enter the French designation. Depending on the language set for the employee or the project, the German, English, or French designation will be displayed.

You can specify for every Absence Reason whether it is "requiring approval." Absences with this Absence Reason must therefore be approved by an Administrator (or Department Manager, if applicable).

You can optionally set whether the employee should be informed by email about the approval or revocation of the approval of their absence (Default setting: Yes).

Every employee may record absences for himself

This controls whether an employee has this Absence Reason available for selection in their Absence Calendar or whether only an Administrator or Department Manager may record this Absence Reason. The recording of this Absence Reason is then only possible via Employees > [Employee Name] > Administration > Calendar.

Example: the Absence Reason "Sick with continued pay" should not be entered by the employee, but only by Administrators.

Additionally, you can specify for each Absence Reason the "absence duration" with which it can be booked.

"Full Day" is always activated. You can optionally store for each Absence Reason whether it may also be booked with "50%" or with the specification of the "Time."

You can specify for each Absence Reason whether the Short Form should be publicly visible, meaning all employees will then see the Absence Reason of the other employee in the calendars released to them as well as in the Absence Overview report.

Set a year and click Execute. You will receive the tables of the Public Holiday Calendars defined in ZEP for this year. If the tables are empty, no Public Holidays have been entered for the relevant year yet.

You must enter the Public Holidays in ZEP for every calendar year (in time, before employees start entering vacations and working hours).

Continue all Public Holiday Calendars from this year for the following year

Click the button Continue all Public Holiday Calendars from YYYY for YYYY+1. All Public Holiday Calendarswith the respective Public Holidays of the corresponding year are continued in the following year.

Under Administration > System > Tasks, there is the Task Continue all Public Holiday Calendars for the following year, which triggers the same action as the button Continue all Public Holiday Calendars from YYYY for YYYY+1.

You can schedule the Task (it does not schedule itself). Execution is on January 1st at 12 PM noon every year. It always creates the Public Holidays for the following year. For example, on 01.01.2025, it will create the Public Holidays for 2026.

Creating Public Holiday Calendars

If you have employees at different locations (e.g., in different Federal States), you can define separate Public Holiday Calendars for them. Click the button + Create New Public Holiday Calendar and enter a name, a description if applicable, and save.

First-time Entry of Public Holidays

After creating a Public Holiday Calendar, when you click the button Calculate Public Holidays for [Calendar Name] for [Year], you can specify for which country (Germany, Austria, or Switzerland) and for which region (Federal State, Canton) the public holidays should be calculated.

Subsequently, you can edit the list of Public Holidays as required by adding missing Public Holidays (Enter new Public Holiday for [Calendar Name]) and deleting invalid ones (trash can symbol). This may be necessary if there are additional regionally valid Public Holidays or for Public Holidays according to a collective agreement.

If ZEP determines that Absences (e.g., vacation) are already recorded on a Public Holiday to be generated, the calculation of Public Holidays is rejected with a corresponding error message. You can determine which employees have recorded Absences via Reports > Employees > Absence Overview. Delete these Absences and restart the calculation of Public Holidays.

You can optionally specify whether Surcharges for Public Holidays and special times should be reported as Time Surcharges and added to the Overtime Account (under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings). These Time Surcharges are calculated starting from the date of the Introduction of the Overtime, Absence, and Vacation module or the last executed Month-end Closing.

You can change the weight and the percentage surcharge (Default setting "0") for every Public Holiday. This information is adopted into the Public Holiday calculation for subsequent years.

When entering an additional Public Holiday, you can:

The Weight of a Public Holiday determines the Target Working Time on that day.

If work was performed on a public holiday, the surcharge also applies on the following day until xx:xx time.

Work on a public holiday is considered work performed between 0:00 AM and 12:00 AM of the respective public holiday. Work on the following day from 12:00 AM until x o'clock also counts as holiday work if the shift began on the public holiday.

The public holidays in the "STANDARD Public Holiday Calendar" apply initially to all employees. Through Public Holiday Exceptions, you can determine that for one or more employees:

Such exceptions result in one row in the Public Holiday Exceptions table per employee and date.

However, you can save time when creating exceptions by saving one exception for multiple employees at once, e.g., for several or all employees of a department:

When you click Enter New Public Holiday Exception, you can set the corresponding department (with the Locations & Departments module) in the pop-up window and select one, several, or all employees from the list. This allows you to record several exception rows simultaneously.

Furthermore, several Actions are available to you for Editing Public Holiday Exceptions:

If you have created all exceptions for one employee and the same exceptions should also apply to one or more other employees: Check the exception rows of the employee and select the action "Transfer marked Public Holiday Exceptions to other employees," select the employees to whom the exceptions should be transferred, e.g., all employees of a specific department, and Execute Action.

If you want to transfer the Public Holiday Exceptions of one calendar year to another year, use the action Transfer marked Public Holiday Exceptions to another year. This transfers not only the Public Holiday Exceptions with a fixed date (e.g., New Year's Day, Christmas) but also the movable holidays (e.g., Easter, Pentecost) to the correct date in the New Year.

The Public Holiday Exceptions table is (with the Locations & Departments module) grouped by Departments. The grouping and sorting of the Departments (by Department Short Form) are retained, even if you sort by Employee or Weight, etc. Sorting by Date and Employee is always added subordinately to the other sorting criteria (Example: if sorted by Weight, then within the same Weight, it is sorted by Date, and within the same Date, it is sorted by Employee).

ZEP offers you the possibility to send emails at various points. For these emails, there are standardized texts included in the emails.

Under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Mail Templates, you can customize the standardized text for the Absence Mail Templates, Absence Request Mail Templates, and the Overtime Mail Templates. You have the option to send specific information through general placeholders.

You can send all Mail Templates as a test email (Preview) to your own email address. Click on Test Send (to own email address) in the column on German/English/French, and you will receive the email in the corresponding language sent to your address.

The input option for Special Times can be found under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Special Times.

Special internal times are freely definable time segments that are considered and displayed in the Month-end Report(Reports > Employees > Overtime & Absences > Month-end Report, as well as Employees > [Employee Name] > Overtime & Absences > Month-end Report).

The working hours of your employees that occur during these "Special Times" are listed accordingly in the Month-end Report.

With Setting "No" for Report time surcharges for public holidays and special times as time surcharges and add them to the Overtime Account (under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings):

With Setting "Yes" for Report time surcharges for public holidays and special times as time surcharges and add them to the Overtime Account (under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings):

Create New List of Special Times

You specify the date from which the list of Special Times is valid.

Whenever you define a new list for Special Times for your company starting from a certain date, you also enter it in ZEP as a new list of Special Times with a new start date of validity.

To enter the Vacation Entitlement for your employees, go to Employees > [Employee Name] > General > Employment Periods.

Fundamentally, you map the agreements regarding the Working Hours (Regular Working Time) and Vacation Times of your employees in ZEP as defined in the corresponding employment contracts.

There are two ways to enter the Vacation Entitlement: Vacation Entitlement in this period or Vacation Entitlement per year.

Vacation Entitlement in this period

Vacation Entitlement per year

Example Vacation Entitlement per Year

An employee starts their employment on 01.08.2023 and has a Vacation Entitlement of 30 days per year. ZEP now calculates the prorated amount for the months of August - December (or up to the month that ends the financial year, according to the setting in Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings).

30:12 x 5 -> 12.5 vacation days for the year 2023.

If you want to enter a different Vacation Entitlement here, also specify a leaving date for the employment period, e.g., 15.08.2023 - 31.12.2023, and then a Vacation Entitlement of 11.25 in that period. Then define another employment period 01.01.2024 - until indefinite and a Vacation Entitlement of 30 days per year.

If you specified under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Settings (Tab "General") that the Vacation Entitlement is always assigned on a specific date, you can set the date precisely.

Vacation Days and Absence Days

This setting is primarily relevant for part-time employees:

correspond to calendar days

convert according to regular working time / full time

For full-time employees who have the same Regular Working Time every day, this setting makes no difference.

For (freelance) employees with Regular Working Time 0, only the setting correspond to calendar days is suitable. And conversely.

You can find the Month-end Closing under Administration > System > Month-end Closing.

If you have newly introduced ZEP or the Absences & Overtime module and have never performed a Month-end Closing:

Specify the month from which you want to introduce the Absences & Overtime module in the ZEP settings (Administration > Overtime > Absences > Settings).

If you use the Locations & Departments module, you can select a department as a filter criterion. Additionally, you can filter by the Employee Category (provided Employee Categories are created under Administration > Employees > Categories). You can select all, single, multiple, or "-none-" categories; the results table will then only show the employees with their monthly data that match the set filter.

Display Details billable/non-billable distribution

The billable recorded times are displayed in green per employee and day, and the non-billable times are displayed in blue. If you click on a day, all project times of the corresponding employee on that day are additionally displayed in a pop-up window. If you click on the employee name in the pop-up window, you are taken directly to that employee's Project Time Recording and can make corrections there if necessary.

Working Time Overview [Month Year]

Here you see whether your employees are using ZEP or whether someone has forgotten to book their times.

If you click on a day, all project times of the corresponding employee on that day are additionally displayed in a pop-up window. If you click on the employee name in the pop-up window, you are taken directly to the employee's project time recording and can make corrections here.

All employees with their hours worked per day are displayed in a table for the selected month.

The "Net Times" are displayed. This means that if a Break Regulation is applied and includes an automatic deduction for non-complied breaks or exceeding the maximum working time, these deductions are subtracted from the recorded time.

A red exclamation mark next to the employee name means that an hour limit for the month (or week, if applicable) has been exceeded (info is available in the flyover).

If an employee has worked on an "Absence Day" (e.g., full-day vacation), the Regular Working Time for that day PLUS the time worked is displayed as the working time for that day. Further information is available in the tooltip and the detail window.

Red marked fields

Too little work performed. You can specify that days on which less than a percentage of the Regular Working Time entered by you was worked are displayed in red.

Gray marked fields

Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays (as well as other days on which the employee has Regular Working Time 0, if applicable) are shaded gray. If time was recorded on such a day, it is displayed in red font.

Yellow marked fields

With Break Regulation: Days on which the Break Regulation was not complied with are marked yellow, and a corresponding text is displayed on mouseover.

If you have an automatic deduction for a non-complied break regulation, the Net Time is displayed in bold. This means that non-complied breaks or exceeded maximum working times are deducted from the recorded time.

Other color-marked fields

Days on which an Absence Reason is entered in the calendar are displayed in the color of the Absence Reason. (The color is definable under Administration > Overtime & Absences > Reasons of Absence) The corresponding legend is listed above the table. On days with paid absence or vacation, the employee's Regular Working Time is displayed.

Columns Target, Actual, Vacation

Target (Soll): Here, the daily target hours (Regular Working Time) are determined from the employee's data and summed up.

Actual (Ist): Working hours + paid Absence Hours (Paid Absence and Vacation) + effective surcharge hours (if activated) - deductions due to the Break Regulation.

Vacation (Urlaub): Sum of the hours of the Absence Reason category "Annual Leave."

You can export the selected month as a CSV file.

If you have set the month that would be next for closing, you will have a button Close Month at the end of the Working Time Overview. During Month-end Closing, ZEP calculates and saves the balance of Overtime and Vacation at the end of the month. These figures are then available for reports, eliminating the need to repeatedly process all bookings from all past years and decades.

Employee locks for this month are also executed automatically with the Month-end Closing.

If you wish to lock employees before performing the Month-end Closing, you can click the lock symbol behind the names of the corresponding employees and confirm the subsequent dialog with Yes. The effects of an employee lock are analogous to the Month-end Closing: no changes can be made for the corresponding employee, not even by the Administrator (recording, changing, or deleting Project Times, Receipts, Absences in that month).

If you want or need to change something in an already closed month, you can undo the Month-end Closing.

You can also unlock all employees at once for a specific month: Click Unlock all employees for Month Year; all employees will then be unlocked (indicated by the gray highlighted lock symbol).

Afterwards, you can make changes and then perform the Month-end Closing again.

Below you will find a list of instructions for the iCal Integration of common services. If you do not find what you are looking for, please inquire with the provider of the system you use. Usually, you can find instructions for integrating iCal links via a simple online search.

Importing iCal calendars does not work natively in Microsoft Outlook 2003. However, you can install an extensionthrough which importing internet calendars is possible.

Please proceed according to the following instructions:

Installation of the Outlook extension "RemoteCalendar"

Outlook 2007 can only integrate calendars that are not password protected; therefore, please generate the link in ZEP without password protection by deactivating the corresponding checkbox!

In Outlook, select Tools -> Account Settings and the Internet Calendars tab.

Add a new calendar here via "New..." and use the URL copied from ZEP http(s)://....

Subsequently, display the calendar additionally via the left navigation pane in Outlook.

Outlook 2010 can only integrate calendars that are not password protected; therefore, please generate the link in ZEP without password protection by deactivating the corresponding checkbox!

In Outlook, select Home -> Account Settings and the Internet Calendars tab.

Add a new calendar here via "New..." and use the URL copied from ZEP http(s)://....

Subsequently, display the calendar additionally via the left navigation pane in Outlook.

Mozilla Thunderbird with Lightning

Install the Thunderbird extension Lightning to use calendar functionality.

Create a new calendar via File -> New -> Calendar and select "On the Network."

Select iCalendar as the format and enter the address displayed in ZEP http(s)://....

If you created the link with password checking, enter your ZEP login credentials for the calendar now.

To avoid having to type the link from ZEP, simply send it to yourself via email on your iPhone. There, copy the link to the clipboard.

Create a new calendar under Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Add Account -> Other -> Add Calendar Subscription

Paste the copied link from ZEP http(s)://… as the server.

If you created the link with password checking, enter your ZEP login credentials for the calendar now.

You can now show and hide the calendar in the iPhone Calendar App using the "Calendars" button.