How to Coda Contract Types?
Employee contracts in various formats
During one of my missions I had to deal with start & end dates of employee contracts. An employee starts, stays or leaves. However if the same employee starts with a contract for 3 months, leaves the company and comes back half a year later to get an open-ended contract, you may want to keep track of that. This blog shows a simple set-up supported by some formulas to get the job done in no time.
Step 01 : defining the type of contracts
This sounds obvious, but it is important to define the contracts we work with. Below what I defined, there are only three items in this list.
Step 02: linking the contracts to a period
The next step is to link these contract types to a duration. Since all values in a column should be of the same type (unless it is a canvas column) we had to make a choice, days, weeks, months or years. Well the most practical choice seems to be months.
The function I developed is an example of simplicity. I blend the Format() with the SwitchIf() to have an outcome that deals with :
- Singular and plural — the last part of the
SwitchIf() - A number or a blank value
- The contract type
In our next step we use these contract types. By the way, we can create as many variations as we want. You have a preference for years and months in the name? You can adapt the Format() and bend it to your will.
Step 03: linking the contract types to employees
Once we have contract types we can relate them to employees and keeping track of the contracts. In this example we have the employee that starts as intern for 6 months, makes a world tour and after coming back gets an open-ended contract.
On purpose I work with a button since a button prints plain text in the assigned column. May it happen that the open-ended contract comes to an end, we do not need an extra column (which would be the case when using a formula in the column end date) but we simply write it in this column. This approach keeps the table fast and reduces human errors.
There are many ways to make this approach smarter. One can imagine that the employee gets the contract emailed (as downloadable pdf) after the button is pressed. An other thing possible is that when an open-ended contract receives an end date, other automations support the organisation to soothe the the goodbye process. Your imaginations are the limit, not so much Coda, although a button that enables a PDF generation would be most welcome.
My name is Christiaan and I support SMB with calculations (budgets and planning) and I prefer using Coda to get the job done.
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