Humanforce alerts are able to automate notifying an employee of an approved leave request.
Below are a list best practices to use when creating this alert.
Alert Name
It's important to use meaningful alert names to help identify the purpose of the alert. In this example, the alert is called "Leave Alert to Employee - Approved."
Group and Function
The group and function identify what the alert is trying to send. As we are looking to send an alert to employees when leave is approved, select the Availability group and the Leave Requests Function.
Execute Every VS Execute At
The Execute Every and Execute At identify how often you want to send alerts out to users. When looking to notify the employee, it is recommended that a set time be user to generate the alert. In this example, the alert will generate at 9:00am each day and is sent to each employee separately.
Allow Resend After
The allow Resend After controls how often we want to alert the user. In this case, it will notify the employee once a week.
Resend no more than
The Resend No More Than value provides a cap of how many times this alert will be sent before it is essentially deactivated. As a best practice, the Resend No More Than value should be left at 0 which means it will continue indefinitely.
Leave Status & Leave Type
The Leave Status & Leave Type value help filter alerts sent to the employees. If you are trying to alert the employee when a request has been approved, the Leave Status should be set to “APPROVED” and the desired leave types enabled.
Date Option
The Date Option allows the alert service to look up the request based on the date the employee entered their leave or the start date of the leave request. In this example, we want to notify the employees based on when their leave is approved by the manager.
Sort option
The Sort Option allows the alert service to order the contents of the message being sent. If set to Date, First Name, Last Name, then if an employee has multiple leave requests approved, they will be listed in date order.
Execute On
The Execute On setting allows the alert service to run on specific days of the week. In this example, the alert service will send every day (assuming the leave is approved).
Send By
The send by values allow you to notify the user either by Internal Message or Email. The internal message will notify the user when they next log in or send a push notification if they have the app installed while the email option sends to the email address on file. For Approved Leave Alerts, we typically recommend only sending by email since there are already System Notifications that cover this functionality.
Execution Offset VS Range Offset
The Execution Offset and the Range Offset allow the alert service to send alerts for leave approved in the last X amount of days, weeks, months or years. In this example, we have set the Execution Offset to look at all leave approved yesterday. Any approved requests which land in this time period will be sent to the employee.
Message template per person
You must use the Message Template Per Person section (on the left) to enter the content which will be sent to the employee. The HTML section will be sent via email while the plain text section is used for internal messages.
Email Content
The email content is what will be sent to the employees when they have approved leave requests. The subject line of the alert should always reference what is being sent while the body of the alert can utilise tables to iterate over multiple leave requests. In the example below, the table values will print out a list of dates and shift types which have been approved using Placeholders.
To learn more about formatting the email content, check out How to use the Alerts HTML email editor? (Video)
Filtering VS Recipients
The Filtering section is used to reduce the employees which receive this alert. Employees can be filtered by the Location, Department, Role, Access level, Employee Type, and more. As we want to notify each employee separately, the Send alert to employee should be ticked.
The Recipients menu is generally used to notify a group of users such as managers and doesn't need to be used in this alert.
