Recording absences
Vacation, sickness and other absences are recorded where the work is recorded — by the day or by the hour, across a whole date range if you like. Afterwards the calendar shows them as a band, and the reports add the days taken up per reason.
Step by step
- 01
Enable absence tracking
Settings → Workspace → General: switch on “Absence tracking / leave account” (admin/owner). Only then do the type switch in the entry form, the bands in the calendar and the absence tiles in the reports appear. Switch it off again later and those elements disappear — the absences already recorded are kept and come back as soon as you switch it on again.
- 02
Switch to “Absence”
When creating an entry, switch the type from “Work” to “Absence”. Customer, project and task then fall away — an absence belongs to no project and is never billable. You can still add a note; it appears wherever the entry is listed.
- 03
Pick a reason
The choices are Vacation, Sick, Doctor’s visit and Other — plus Time off in lieu once target working time is switched on. The reason can be changed later; whether an absence is full-day or hourly, however, is fixed when it is created and is only shown, never edited, afterwards.
- 04
Full day or by the hour
A full day marks the day as a whole, with no hour figure of its own. With target working time switched on, a full vacation day counts that day’s target — someone who works four hours on Wednesdays uses four hours on a Wednesday off, not eight. An hourly absence is recorded like a manual entry with from–to or a duration, for a doctor’s appointment in the afternoon, say.
- 05
Several days at once
For a full-day absence you give an end date, and iXTime stores one entry per day. The end date is preset to the start date, so a single day needs no extra input. If a weekend falls inside the range you are asked whether to skip it — “skip” is preselected, and the resulting number of days is shown. With target working time on, iXTime does not ask: every day of the range is booked, weekends, public holidays and free days of the work model included. Those days cost nothing from the leave account and do not count as vacation days in the reports; the dialog adds a summary such as “7 working days · 56:00 h · 5 days without target”. An hourly absence covers one day only.
- 06
Review the days taken
Open Reports, choose the period (the year, for instance) and set the member or group in the filter: the absence tile adds up per reason — full days as days, hourly absence as hours, never blended into one figure.
In the calendar
A full-day absence sits as a band across its day, an hourly one as a block within it. Both are drawn dashed and in one constant tone — project colours are freely chosen, so an extra colour could not reliably mark something as an absence. Clicking the day opens the absence to view, change or delete it, rather than starting a new entry. Contiguous vacation days with the same reason are recognised as a block again: you edit or delete them as one absence, and you are told beforehand how many days that affects.
In the reports
Overview and detailed reports carry their own absence tile, grouped by reason and in the unit that is actually known (“Vacation 3 days · Doctor 3.0 h”). In the timesheet, absence forms its own block below the project rows — one row per reason, with a tinted cell per day and a total like “2 days + 3 h”. In the working-time report, a day spent fully absent carries its reason as the label instead of computing work and break time; an hourly absence sits next to the time worked and does not count as a break.
The leave account
With target working time switched on as well, iXTime keeps a leave account in hours — per member and leave year (a calendar year or, for example, the school year), under Time accounts → Leave. Every vacation entry counts there as taken or planned: a full day consumes that day’s target, a public holiday inside a vacation nothing, an hourly absence its span. How entitlement and carry-over are set and a year’s accounts are created is covered in the “Leave account” article.
What absence does not change
Absence never counts as worked time and enters no billable, cost or margin figure: the same report returns identical values with and without absence entries. The one exception is utilization against target time — there absence reduces the available target time, because nobody on vacation can bill. A timer cannot be resumed from an absence — only work is resumed. In every other respect an absence behaves like any other entry: the period lock applies, every change goes into the change history, and who may see it follows the same visibility rules (own / group / all). The working-time report itself is available on desktop; the calendar, the entry form and the overview’s absence tile are on the phone just as they are there.
Does iXTime keep leave entitlements and approvals?
iXTime keeps a leave account in hours — entitlement, carry-over, taken and remaining. There is no approval process. The leave account requires target working time to be switched on — setup in the “Leave account” article.
I don’t see a switch to “Absence” — why?
Absence tracking is switched on per workspace and is off by default. An admin or owner enables it under Settings → Workspace → General.
Why can’t I record anything on a vacation day?
A full-day absence owns the day: no other entry can be created and no timer started on it. The same applies the other way round — a full-day absence cannot be placed on a day that already has entries. If you need both on one day, record the absence by the hour.
Can I turn an absence into a work entry?
No. Whether an entry is work or absence, and whether it is full-day, is fixed when it is created. Delete it and create it again — that keeps the change history unambiguous. The reason of an absence, on the other hand, can be changed at any time.
How do I delete a multi-day vacation?
From any day of the block. iXTime recognises contiguous days with the same reason as one absence and names the period and the number of days affected before deleting.
Are public holidays handled automatically?
Without target working time, iXTime asks whether weekends should be skipped when you enter a date range. With target working time every day is booked, and what a day costs follows from its target: a public holiday costs nothing and does not count as a vacation day. Public holidays are kept by the workspace as day exceptions of the target working time — for Austria and Germany a whole year at a click. A vacation block across a public holiday consumes no leave hours on that day, because nothing is owed on it — and if a holiday is deleted later, the booked day consumes its target by itself.