Over the last month, we spent time with customers designing ways to improve Kin’s time-off tracking. Then we sat down and got busy coding. The result is a more accurate, informative, and flexible way to manage your team’s vacations, leave, holidays, and accruals.
Time-off projections
For companies using Kin’s time-off accrual feature, users now see a projection of how much time-off will accumulate during a year. This is handy for employees requesting time off in the future, so they understand how much time they will have as opposed to only showing what they currently do. It’s handy for managers too; they can make a better informed decision when approving/declining requests.
Kin now shows a projection of earned time off.
Work schedules and break time
Tell Kin your standard office hours, and Kin will factor them in when calculating the duration of a time-off entry. Bonus: enter in break time (for lunch breaks, etc.) and Kin will deduct them from the time-off request’s total.
Work schedules are configured on a per-policy level, so you can create a work schedule (and related time-off policy) for your night-owls and one for your early-risers.
Kin calculates time off more accurately with work schedules.
Improvements to time-off configurations
If you’re an HR Manager, you’ll notice a few nice improvements to the time-off policy configuration process. These updates are all based on customer feedback, so here ya go:
Policy start-dates
You can now specify a date when a new policy should be activated. Previously, Kin would automatically look back to the beginning of the year or to an employee’s date of hire (whichever was first). This little detail helps Kin more accurately assess and assign starting time-off balances when companies deploy a new policy.
Custom renewal date
If your time-off policy refreshes on a date other than January 1st each year, or on an employee’s anniversary, you’re in luck. Kin now offers a custom renewal date for your policy refresh. So, if your fiscal year starts on March 1st, well, enter March 1st as your refresh date. Cake.
Expire carry-over time
Lot’s of companies allow time off to carry over into the new year (or past a hiring anniversary). Well, up until this release, that carry-over time would be there until the employee either used it, or the employer removed it manually. Kin now offers the ability to expire carry over time off on a specific date.
Exclude company holidays from time-off requests
When you set up your company’s work schedule, you can also tell Kin to take company holidays into account. That means when an employee requests time off that bridges a company holiday (when the office is already closed), Kin will automatically deduct those days from the total so they don’t come out of the employee’s balance.
Export your data for payroll
Lot’s of companies need to share their time-off data with their payroll service to ensure employees are getting compensated accurately. We’ve made this a whole lot easier with Kin’s new export feature. Kin can now export any time-off policy’s data (requests, balances, etc.) by date range to match a specific pay cycle.
Export time-off data changes for more accurate payroll.
Onwards!
This isn’t the last you’ll see of the Kin team improving the time-off feature. But it is for a little while. We’ve got a lot of great stuff cooking right now in the direction of new-hire onboarding, and just like with this round of updates, we’re excited to work side by side with our customers to build a better tool, process, and ultimately, employee experience.