At ventriloc, one of our core objectives is to increase transparency in sharing our internal data with our employees. In this article, we will explore how we have improved the management of the vacation bank through the use of Power BI.
The Challenge Faced by Many
Too often, managing vacation banks is done manually with Excel files and endless formulas. This is followed by a series of emails to communicate the information to the concerned employee. The next day, another employee sends a request, and the process starts all over again. Employees rarely have a quick and up-to-date view of their vacation balance, and the process of communicating it to them is cumbersome.
To address this real issue, we decided to use Power BI to share real-time vacation data with our employees. This approach automates the process and centralizes all vacation management in one place.
The Process for Making Data Available
As the saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out”. It is crucial to have a clear and strict process for recording vacations. Ideally, vacations are entered into a time tracking software. To this end, ventriloc has chosen to use MinuteDock as our time tracking tool, including vacations and leave. MinuteDock is very user-friendly, offering an intuitive interface and an API with which we can extract data for analysis (if you don’t have a time tracking tool, we highly recommend it!). To clearly identify vacations, we have defined specific codes in MinuteDock that employees can use to enter their vacation time.
Next, to make the data available to users, we developed a report using Microsoft Power BI. As shown in Figure 1, employees have access to a specific view that allows them to quickly check their vacation statistics. You will quickly notice that our Chief Operating Officer, Mathieu Leblanc, likes to take it easy in July 😂.
