Guide: Notifications Within Vacation Tracker

Our Notifications include approved/scheduled leave information that can be sent to channels (if you are using our Microsoft Teams or Slack integrations) and/or email addresses. These notifications can be set by Admins and Approvers and customized using settings such as filters, frequency, etc. The main goal of our notifications is to provide your team a better overview of scheduled leaves so that you can easily organize projects, workloads and keep all users updated on their colleague's time away.

| This article breaks down each setting and provides a more detailed overview of our notifications. If you are looking for steps on setting notifications, please see the following article: How Do I Set Notifications Within Vacation Tracker?

A Vacation Tracker notification includes the following:

• The names of employees who will be on leave
• The type of leave they’re taking
• Duration of their leaves
• Any upcoming regional holidays grouped by location

Let's first break down the general settings when setting Notifications:

The Notification Name is used as a reference on the main Notification page within Vacation Tracker and will show at the end of each notification you receive as a reference point. The name is also used in the desktop notifications in case you are receiving the notifications as messages via a channel (both Slack and Microsoft Teams).

The Filter By option let's you filter by: Department, Location and Labels. If you are part of our Core plan you will only have the option to filter by Department and Location. If you are part of our Complete plan, you will be able to filter using Labels as well. For more information on the difference between our plans please see: Guide : What Are The Differences Between Our Core & Complete Plans?

We've allowed customization when it comes to our filters as well so you can filter by one or more departments/locations/labels but you can also mix and match. You can select a department and add an additional location filter.

For example: creating a notification for the Support department but only including the Montreal location and sending it to the Montreal channel to all of the Montreal office employees.

Another example would be if you were using our Labels feature and let's say you set a label for a project various departments are working on. You can filter by the label for said project and filter by selecting all of the departments related to the project.

If you do not select any filters, all active users within Vacation Tracker will be included in the notification.

Next, we have the frequency of the notifications: Daily or Weekly. When setting your notification you can select one of the two options based on the information you want to be included and when the notification will be sent. If you choose to set a daily notification, the daily notification will include scheduled leave information for the day it arrives on, as well as the next working day. If you choose to set a weekly notification, the weekly notification will include scheduled leave information for the whole week.

When setting the daily notification you have an option to check-mark the days you want the notification to arrive on. For the weekly notification, you choose the one day in the week you would want the notification to arrive on.

For the weekly notification you also have an additional option to select the Period Covered. You can choose if you want to include scheduled leave information for the current week or next week (the following week).

For example: let's say you choose current week and the notification arrives on Monday. Your notification that would arrive on Monday, December 6th will include leave information related to the week of December 6th to December 12th (depending on your working week of course).

Now let's say you choose next week and the notification arrives on Monday, December 6th. The notification will include leave information related to the following week, the week of December 13th to December 19th (one week in advance).

These notifications will also be affected by the option to choose when your company's working week starts. You can choose to set the start of your working week to Monday or Sunday. Finally, select the time of arrival for the notification and the timezone.

Next we have the different options you can use to send these notifications and notify your users of scheduled leaves. Although quite similar, each integration has it's own options: sending via channel or email or both!

Slack Integration

You can select either a channel or an email address(es) to send the notifications to or the mix of the two options! If you choose to send the notifications via a channel, our bot will recognize the channels associated with your Slack workspace and list them in the channel drop-down menu. You can also send notifications to private channels within Slack.

If you choose to send the notification via email, the field will allow you to enter one or multiple email addresses. You can also include group-based email addresses such as support@yourdomain.com or hr@yourdomain.com.

Microsoft Teams Integration

You can select either a channel or an email address(es) to send the notifications to or the mix of the two options! If you choose to send the notifications via a channel, you will first need to choose the Team from MIcrosoft Teams and then our bot will recognize the channels associated with the selected team and list them in the channel drop-down menu. Please keep in mind, if the bot is not added to the team within Microsoft Teams, our bot will not recognize the team nor the channels to list. For more information on adding the bot to your Microsoft Teams account, please see Step 2 of the following article: Microsoft Teams: Signing Up / Setting Up Vacation Tracker

|| Please note that at this time, notifications can only be sent to private channels using our Slack integration. We do plan to release this option in the future for Microsoft Teams users as well. However, this option may require additional permissions to be allowed. If you are part of our Microsoft Teams integration and you are interested in this option, feel free to reach out to our Support Team via chat or email ( hello@vacationtracker.io ) for more information.

If you choose to send the notification via email, the field will allow you to enter one or multiple email addresses. You can also include group-based email addresses such as support@yourdomain.com or hr@yourdomain.com.

Google Workspace Integration

Our Google integration does not include the channel option; however, you can definitely send notifications via email to one or multiple email addresses.

The notifications that are sent out can also be grouped by Departments or Locations. This means that the leave information in the notification will be organized according to these filters. If no option is selected, the leave information will display in alphabetical order.

Filtered by Departments:

Filtered by Locations:

No Filter:

We also provide you with the option to receive notifications when there are no scheduled leaves. You can set this setting for both daily and weekly type notifications. Here are examples of notifications where there are no scheduled leaves:

Slack Integration

Microsoft Teams

Google Workspace integration

Once the settings have been configured, a summary of the notifications will show on the bottom of the page. You can use the summary to confirm you set the correct settings and even see the list of all users that will be included in the notification.

Once you are done, click on Save Notification!

On the main Notification page, you will see a list of all active notifications. This list will include notifications that were created by any of the Admins and/or Approvers. On the right-hand side there is also a Send Now option that can be used at any time in case you want to send out, test out or preview the notification that will be sent out. You can also use the Send Now option to push a notification if there is an update after the automated notification was already set.

Notifications can also be deactivated or deleted at any time, but only by an Admin. Approvers can also delete and edit notifications but only the ones they created themselves. For more information on how to delete or disable notifications please see the following article: How Do I Disable / Delete Notifications?