How using budget allowance works

Budget allowance is an allotment for how many agents can be away on a specific day. This can be used for automatic approval of absence requests, often for periods which are not scheduled or where the staffing situation for other reasons is not a good basis to decide if an agent can be away or not.

Set up budget allowance

Create budget groups in the Budgets module. Set up the allowance for each budget group. The budget group is a group of skills which are related, often through cross-skilled agents. Set absence types as included in the request allowance on a custom shrinkage in the budget to include them in the calculation of allowance. See Create allowances for absence requests for more information.

Assign the agents a budget group based on the skills they are working with.

Use allowance for automatic approval

When using allowance for automatic approval of absence requests, the absence request validation will check if the Allowance after threshold value in the budget has been exceeded. It will deny (or waitlist) the absence request if the allowance is exceeded or if the approval of this request would cause it to be exceeded.

When setting up the allowance, decide if automatic approval of absence requests can use all the calculated allowance, or to only allow automatic approval until a certain percentage. Not using the full allowance provides some margin if the forecast or staffing situation changes and you can always change the value later.

See How absence request validation works for more details on using budget allowance for automatic approval of absence requests.

Use allowance for manual approval

When approving absence requests manually in the web Requests tool, use the View allowance view to see how much of the allowance that has already been used and how much that remains.

See Review allowance when approving absence requests for more details on how to interpret the values in that view.