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Registering an absence for an employee

An employee can be absent for all sorts of reasons: leave, illness, short-term leave, and so on. If you register those hours, the employee's hours add up correctly at the end of the week and you see straight away in the dayplanning who is not there.

Absence hours come together in three places in Robaws:

Registering an absence in the dayplanning
Registering an absence in Wappy
Processing absences in the time check

If you work with the time-off requests module, you do not have to do this manually: an approved time-off request turns itself into a planning item and into absence hours.

What you set up first

Before you can register an absence, you get three things ready.

What	What for	Where you set it up
Time-off category	The category says what it is about: leave, illness, short-term leave, and so on. It also determines the colour of the item in the dayplanning.	settings > dayplanning > master data > time-off categories, or settings > time-off requests
Hour type of the type Absence	The hour type says how the absence is processed administratively. On every absence hour type you fill in a time-off category.	settings > employees > master data > hour type
Weekly schedule on the employee	Robaws works out from the weekly schedule how many hours that employee is absent per day, break included.	employee file, field Weekly schedule

Without a weekly schedule on the employee, Robaws does not create any absence hours. That employee is skipped and Robaws shows a message with their name.

The Hour type field only appears once you have switched on hour types via settings > employees. If you work with a payroll office, also fill in the code on the hour type: you need it for the SCAB integration or the export for Prisma (Sodeco Software).

Registering an absence in the dayplanning

You enter an absence in the dayplanning as an ordinary planning item, but with a time-off category instead of an assignment.

Go to the dayplanning module.
Create a new planning item with the add action button at the top, or click in the overview on the right day for the right employee.
Give the item a title.
Fill in the start and end date. If the absence lasts several days, you set the first and the last day of the period.
Add the employee who is absent under Employees. You can select several, for example when a whole team is off at the same time.
Fill in the Time-off category.
Fill in the Hour type.
Save the planning item.

If you choose an hour type first, Robaws fills in the time-off category automatically. If you choose a category first, you only see the hour types that belong to that category. If you then change the category, the hour type is cleared so that you choose a matching hour type again.

In the overview, the planning item takes on the colour of the time-off category. If you also assigned a planning type, that always takes precedence over the colour of the category. Via the display action button you determine whether you want to see absences in the overview.

A planning item with a time-off category is not an absence hour yet. You convert such planning items with the Synchronise absences button in the time check.

Is it collective leave or a public holiday for your whole organisation? Then a leave period is easier: it colours the background of those days in the dayplanning and the project planning. A leave period does not register any hours, though; for that you still need a planning item or a time-off request.

Registering an absence in Wappy

Your employee can also enter their absence themselves in the hours overview in Wappy. That is handy for hours that could not be worked because of illness or holiday.

Open the hours overview in the Wappy menu.
Click on + at the bottom.
Choose the date you are registering hours for. That can be today or a day in the past.
Choose absence.
Fill in the number of hours and the hour type.
Send the registration.

For an absence, only two fields appear. No work order is created for an absence either, unlike for a presence.

The hours your employee registers via Wappy end up in the time check in Robaws. You still have to save and approve them there. Only after approval do they appear with a green tick in the hours overview in Wappy.

The hours overview is available from a particular Wappy plan onwards and requires an employee to be linked to the user file.

Processing absences in the time check

The time check is where all presence and absence hours come together and where you approve them. You find it in the work orders module under the calendar display, with the detail view switched off.

In that overview, a hatched cell is an absence and a cell that is not hatched is a presence. If you click on the number of hours for a day, the detail panel opens at the bottom with the registered hours of that employee for that day.

Converting planning items into absence hours

You bring in the absences you entered in the dayplanning as follows:

In the time check overview, open the period you want to process.
Click on Synchronise absences at the top right.
Confirm the question that appears.

Robaws then takes all planning items in the visible period that have a time-off category and turns them into absence hours: one line per day, with a start and end time within the hours of that employee's weekly schedule.

When you synchronise, the existing absence hours in that period are first deleted and then created again. All changes you made manually to those absence hours are therefore lost. Hours with the status Sent do stay in place.

If there are planned employees without a weekly schedule, Robaws reports after the synchronisation who they are. No absence hours are created for those employees.

Adding absence hours manually for one day

Click in the overview on the cell for the right employee and the right day.
Click on Add absence hours in the detail panel at the bottom.
Complete the line and save.

On such a line you fill in the following fields:

Field	Explanation
Employee	The employee who is absent.
Hour Type	The hour type of the type absence.
Time-off category	The category the absence falls under. If you choose an hour type, the category is copied automatically.
Remarks	Free explanation of the absence.
Start time and End time	The beginning and the end of the absence.
Hours	The number of absence hours.
Status	Not Checked, Approved or Sent.

Adding absence hours in bulk

Does an absence last several days, or does it concern several employees? Then you add the hours in one go.

Click on + at the top left in the time check overview. The Add presence/absence hours window opens.
Fill in From date and Up to and including date.
Select one or more employees under Employees.
Set Hourtype type to Absence. The project, item and activity fields then disappear, because they belong to a presence.
Choose the Hour Type.
Click on Save, or on Save & Approve if you want to approve the hours straight away.

Robaws then creates an absence hour for each day in that period according to each employee's weekly schedule. Days on which no work is done according to the weekly schedule are skipped.

The hour type is mandatory in this window. Employees without a weekly schedule are not included; Robaws reports this per employee.

Approving performance

If the registered hours match what that employee actually worked or took off that day, you approve them. An absence hour goes through three statuses:

Not Checked: the hours are registered, but have not been checked yet.
Approved: the hours have been checked and confirmed.
Sent: the hours have been sent through to your payroll office. Sent hours are no longer overwritten by a synchronisation.

Only presence and absence hours with an hour type that counts towards the schedule are used to calculate whether the number of hours to be worked for that day has been reached. You set that per hour type.

Registering an absence through a time-off request

The time-off requests module is included in the Robaws Pro licence.

If you work with time-off requests, you do not have to do anything twice. Your employee requests their leave via Wappy or the Robaws App and only chooses a time-off category there. The person responsible adds the correct hour type during the approval.

As soon as the request is approved, Robaws automatically creates:

a planning item in the dayplanning, with the employee, the time-off category and the hour type from the request;
the corresponding absence hours in the time check.

If the requested hours differ from the employee's weekly schedule, the time check also gets a correction line with the difference alongside the line based on the weekly schedule. That line carries the remark Correction hours due to weekly schedule.

Updated on: 08/09/2026

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