How to Request a Leave of Absence in Education Industry

Photo by Vasily Koloda

The majority of educational institutions have compulsory attendance policies for academic staff and students. Teachers, lecturers and professors record daily or even hourly student attendance, that is often connected with the grading system. At the same time, accountants and HR managers need to have access to staff schedules and their attendance to ensure accurate leave management and payrolls. Both cases illustrate the significance of attendance tracking systems in educational institutions.

Corporate calendars and leave management systems are widely used in the business environment, while most educational organizations still use paper schedules and absence request letters. Let’s see how your educational institution can benefit from such tools drawing on the example of actiPLANS absence management system.

How to Manage Leave Requests in Educational Organizations

Request a Leave of Absence In a Few Clicks

With actiPLANS, lecturers and professors can record their time-off hours and days, sick leaves, set statuses and leave notes for other users.

For example, staff can set “Sick Leave” status any time without writing absence request letters and waiting for their approval. Management staff will be notified shortly about the absence and will be able to inform students about changes in their schedules.

Create Custom Leave Types and Statuses

In actiPLANS, you can define any number of leave types: sick leave, time off, vacation, business trip, family leave — any custom leave type that fits your organization’s needs and goes with its policy.

For example, during pandemic times, students, administrators and other educators could benefit from creating a custom “Remote Work” status. This would allow them to learn if they can meet their colleagues at work or require to communicate and resolve issues remotely.

Control Paid Time Off and Sick Days Balances

actiPLANS also allows accountants to establish transparent PTO and sick-leave balances. They can define individual or company-wide accrual rules for any leave type and edit balances manually. More than that, users can review their balances and changelogs to make sure that their balances are correct.

Review Attendance

The key interface of actiPLANS is an attendance calendar that displays requested and approved leaves, statuses, tardiness notes and comments across the whole organization. Managers, administrators, colleagues can review the calendar anytime to check availability status and planned leaves.

Export Data to Any Calendar

Suppose you need to share educators’ schedules with their students but don’t want to provide them with access to actiPLANS. In that case, you can export the data to other calendar apps, including Google Calendar and other iCal-based systems.

Review Absence Statistics, Analytics and Reports

In actiPLANS, HR managers and accountants can review absence, balance and status statistics in a few clicks. They can review leaves for set periods or custom date ranges, compare them across the users and export the data.

Request a Leave of Absence Using Mobile App

actiPLANS is also available as a mobile app where you can submit tardiness notes, leaves, statuses, keep track of other users’ attendance statuses. Use it to review who is off and when they’ll be back at work and be notified about any changes in your colleagues’ work schedules.

Ready to Manage Leaves of Absence Online?

actiPLANS is an absence management system that offers a corporate calendar, leave request management, automatic calculation of paid time off and sick leave balances, free mobile app and more. With actiPLANS, you can share your schedules with HR managers, accountants, colleagues and students to notify about your tardiness and absences.

Start your free 30-day trial (no credit card required) or request a product demo to find out if actiPLANS is the right fit for your needs.