Coda time off (PTO) — Version 0.0
Working schedules in action — introduction
I created planning schedules for USA and EU companies It became clear that there is lot of variation in how employers have to register time off. In the USA the distinction between Exempt, Non-Exempt, Intern, Consultant is prominent. In Europe highly flexible working schedules are possible like 3 hours on Monday and 8 hours on Tuesday.
If an American company has a PTO policy that combines vacation, sick, and personal days, employees can typically use PTO in half-day increments. Most European companies follow this logic. However when you only work 2 hours during the evening and you don’t work that ‘day’, you did not work for 2 hours instead of half a day. However governments tend to see this at not working one day (regardless the hours).
On top working schedules can vary. You start with 4 days a week, you go to 5, move back to 4 etc and per day you can have period dependent working hours. One week the early shift, next week the day, then the late shift, week off etc.
This all looks complex. When it comes to counting the time some one did not work, it is a good to follow set up. This changes when you deal with additional limitations based on regulations like the first 3 days per calendar month are paid 100%, after it drops. You add holidays that differ per country and so on. The HR realm is stuffed with rules and obligations you never could have thought of until you have to work with them.
How much does this cost?
It depends is the most common answer and that is true to a certain extend. People like me who have done this before, can look into templates, follow patterns and have a trained intuition. The most simple set up : counting half-day periods per month for people working only full time, without holidays, but with the logic all people work Monday — Friday, will be at least 1500 Euro. You need:
- a form to capture the data
- a calculation to define the consumed time
- a feedback loop to the employee
- a trigger to HR
- etc.
Most experts are likely asking more due to a combination of higher fees and the lack of experience. The moment you work with variable working schedules and holidays (different per country), the complications grow exponentially. You will easily jump to 5K , 10K or 17.5K and most self proclaimed will be unable to deliver and suggest you to take an external HR tool and use a pack.
Why would you do this in Coda?
Most often standard software cannot provide unless you pay a serious on top which is likely to be more expensive. Second you want ease of mind. Once you have most of your processes in Coda your operations run smoother. So far I am not impressed by tools like Bamboo HR and others. Third, you show your innovative side to your employees. Although Coda is a teenager, it is still a remarkable young company in almost everything it does and on the forefront of technology. Last but not least I’d like to express costs in relation to headcounts. 30 people in your org and 15K, makes 500 Euro per person for something that lasts at least a few years. That is a good investment.
In this serie I’ll show you how you can set up a PTO yourself. Sometimes people warn me: don’t share it all. Then I smile, it is one thing to understand the code part, it is something else to understand the data architecture required to make this work. Code I can share in a blog, the rest in a template (15K).
How to get started?
We create a people table with people working in our organisation and a table defining the departments and their roles. We also create a table with working schedules. We have two variations. One working with complete days only and one dealing with hours per day (often shifts) and breaks. Here complexity already kicks in. Not only when it comes to the set up of the tables, but also to keep the tables up to date. In my experience, most HR people are a kind of afraid to work in tables directly. For them I create a form permitting to use a simpler data input system. You see, it easily gets complicated, although nothing difficult has happend yet.
I looked back at my previous work and although it is clever, I can see what will block most HR people from using such a set up: too many steps.
In most applications, the front end and back end are apart and designers take care of the UX. This is something we tend to forget in Coda.
Any way, I will set up a comparable logic in a doc and next time we start with the complicated variations (different rules for different countries and flexible work schedules). It is better to integrate the boundaries as soon as possible, that will force you to create a clean set up.
To a certain extend I’ll reuse content already shared — the list is longer, but so you have an idea.
How to Coda dynamic intervals?
Planning based on days and weeks (not months & years)
huizer.medium.com
I hope you enjoyed this intro article. If you have already questions feel free to reach out.
My name is Christiaan and blog about Coda. Though this article is for free, my work (including advice) won’t be, but there is always room for a chat to see what can be done. You find my (for free) contributions in the Coda Community and on Twitter. the Coda Community provides great insights for free once you add a sample doc.
All the AI features we are starting to see appear — lower prices, higher speeds, multimodal capability, voice, large context windows, agentic behavior — are about making AI more present and more naturally connected to human systems and processes. If an AI that seems to reason like a human being can see and interact and plan like a human being, then it can have influence in the human world. This is where AI labs are leading us: to a near future of AI as coworker, friend, and ubiquitous presence. I don’t think anyone, including OpenAI, has a full sense of all of the implications of this shift, and what it will mean for all of us. — source: Ethan Mollick from One Useful Thing.
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