On a newly installed TMS system, you can add in historical absences in order to maintain a more complete picture of your employees’ absence history.

There are a couple of ways to do this. If you ae happy to add these in yourself then steps to do this are below. Alternatively, or if you have a large number of historical absences to add in, you can book one of our professional services team to import the data for you by contacting your account manager.

Preparation

Preparing employees

First you will need to ensure your employees are correctly set up to allow the historical absences to be entered. The fields you will need to check are below. Please note, your system will have been customised for you use, o these fields may be in slightly different locations or on a different panel.

Start Date – neither the Roster or Process From date should be before the employee’s Start Date.

Roster – You will need to check that the employee’s Roster is valid for the period into which you are entering historical absences. More details on this are below.

Process From date – The Process From date needs to be set to the date of the first historical absence to be entered for the employee or before.

Apply Assumed Clocks – If you want to allow the system to automatically create the underlying work records (see “Creating work records” below), you will need to tick this. Please note which employees you have ticked this for, as after inputting the historical absences you will need to untick this again.

Checking the Roster field

You will need to check that the Roster field has a valid value for period into which you are entering historical absences.

In WinTMS, go to the “Employee Details” screen, right click the “Roster” field and click “Screen History”. This will show a screen detailing the historical values associated with each field. If the “Roster” field is blank for any of the dates that you will be inputting historical absences, click the “Edit” button and enter the correct roster.

Preparing the Absence Profile

When viewing the Absence Profile, you can choose which absence codes to display. You will need to ensure you have the correct absence codes displayed, or any absence you add in will not show up despite it being recorded by the system.

In WinTMS, go to the Absence Profile, click the “Absence codes” button and move the required codes to the right hand list.

In TMSWeb, go to the Absence Profile, click the cog in the top right, scroll to the bottom of the “Absence codes to display” list and click in the small blank space to add a code.

Entering historical absences

Once you employees have been prepared, you can begin adding in historical absences. You can do this in WinTMS via the “Employee” menu and “Planned absence”->”Individual”. Alternatively, you can add these in via the TMSWeb Absence Profile. Don’t worry if these absences do not show in the Absence Profile, they will show after completing the next steps.

Creating work records

TMS relies on work records when it comes to past absences. These will need to be created in order for the historical absences to show correctly. You can create these work records manually by going into the clock card, or automatically by reprocessing your employees.

Manually creating work records

To manually create the work records using WinTMS, go into the employee’s clock card, scroll to the required date, then right click on the left hand bar of the table and select “Insert day”. You can then choose the correct shift and TMS will add in the expected absence.

Automatically creating work records

If you are adding historical absences for a lot of employees, you can use the “Redo current period processing” feature. Please note that this will remove and recreate the work records for all selected employees during the period selected; you will lose any manual changes that have been made to the work records during the selected period. It is strongly advised that you test using this feature on a single employee before using it on multiple employees. 

In WinTMS, go to the “Group” menu, “Redo current period processing”.

Choose the date range to reprocess. Please be very careful to select the correct date range.

Choose the employees to reprocess.

Confirm everything is correct by clicking “Yes”