Every growing business needs a way to track employee vacations efficiently—after all, it’d be chaos if you never knew the schedules of your fellow colleagues.
While paper forms once served this purpose, many companies have chosen to move on and go paperless with their out of office forms.
It’s really a win-win: It helps eliminate clutter and is eco-friendly. Plus, everything is all in one place and you can invite coworkers with FormAssembly accounts to view submissions at any time.
If you’re looking for a simple, straightforward time off request form builder, then check out how you can create awesome out of office forms using FormAssembly:
Choose a design
When building web forms online, the design possibilities are endless.
With web forms, you can make changes to the design instantly. If you want to add your company’s logo, implement a new field, change the background colors or the font—it can all be done in a matter of seconds.
It’s always good when a form reflects a company’s culture and branding. If you’re a small, scrappy startup, you might go for a fun, colorful design over a standard black and white color scheme.
Narrow down your questions
Like any other web form, the key here is to narrow down your questions so that the fields featured are ones that are absolutely necessary.
A long, drawn-out form will eat up time and resources. So, keep it short and simple.
Every business is different, but a few fields that most everyone needs are: First name, last name, department, and of course the dates they would like to request off.
You can also add an optional field for additional comments, just in case an employee would like to elaborate. For example, someone might say that they’d like several days off, but that one day would be a half day.
Decide who will view each submission
Since you don’t want those responses getting lost in a black hole, you’ll want to decide who will be in charge of viewing each time off request. Whether it be each department head, your secretary, or yourself—it’s easy to share forms using FormAssembly’s “Share” feature.
You can create a separate time off form for each department, and you can even create an all-in-one form which collects company-wide submissions. It’s also worth noting that with dynamic routing, it’s very simple to send certain responses to specific departments.
Bear in mind that anyone who will be a form administrator must have their own separate account.
To grant form access, simply login to your FormAssembly account, click “Edit” next to the form of your choice, hit “Configure” and then “Share.”
After clicking “Share,” type in your colleague’s FormAssembly username to invite them. You can choose whether to let them view the responses, give them the ability to edit the form, or both.
And you’re done! Easy as ever, right?
Set your notification settings
Do you really want to login to manually check each submission? Probably not. That’s why we offer email notifications for anyone who would like a heads up about new form responses.
Email notifications are enabled by default. To customize your email settings, login to your FormAssembly account, find your form, click “Edit,” then “Configure” and “Notifications.”
Here you can choose to enable either text or HTML emails. Plus, you can make sure that you’ll be notified whenever new submissions roll in.
If you’d like to get really fancy and totally automate this process, you can incorporate approve/deny capabilities with dynamic email notifications (see picture above).
Implementing this would mean that a supervisor would receive an email with a link to a prefilled form where they would then either approve or deny a time off request. After that, the employee would receive an email with their supervisor’s response. With dynamic email notifications and prefilled forms, all of this can be automatic.
Export results
If you’d like to print out a full list of time off requests (say, for bookkeeping purposes), you can easily do this with our “Export” feature.
For example, if you wanted to open the results in Excel, you would login to your FormAssembly account, find your form, and click the responses link (highlighted in red in the picture below).
After that, you can choose to export all responses in the format of your choice. You can choose CSV, HTML, XML, or attachments.
Conclusion
If you’re a fan of streamlining your business processes online, then you’d likely benefit from building and hosting your company’s time off request forms online.
As you can see, there is more to a web form than meets the eye. Your forms should be consistent with your company’s vision and branding, each form should have a designated admin, and the form should be straightforward and easy to use.
Has your company created an awesome time off request form online? We’d love to see it! Share your form with us in the comments.
