In this update, managers and admins can now set a user's Working Hours per day, and not just per week as before. Working Hours are also displayed in the Scheduler, making it easier to confidently schedule work within a technician's working hours. In addition, businesses with changing shift patterns and on-call rotas are supported through Working Hours Exceptions. These can be used when an employee's working hours vary from their defaults. Exceptions are also displayed in the Scheduler view.

Finally, this update supports Allowable Overtime, which is also displayed in the Scheduler view and adds greater power when Smart Scheduling.

The User record contains a new Working Hours table, consisting of a 7-day view, including Allowable Overtime (in minutes) which can be specified for each day. The Working Hours set here are reflected in the Scheduler view as gray shading. Overtime is shown as a dotted pattern. In Fig. 3 below, three technicians have regular hours of 8am – 5pm, The last tech, Herbie works a night shift from 8pm to 4am. You can also see the first two techs have Allowable Overtime of 120 mins at the end of each day.

Click the Edit button on the User page to set the user's working hours. When you first view the Working Hours table after this release, you will see the user's old working hours extended to every day of the week (Fig. 4). To mark a day as a non-working day, disable the toggle switch for that day, as in Fig. 5: Working Hours table with Overtime Mon-Fri, and no work on Saturday and Sunday. In Fig. 5, the user has 120 mins of Allowable Overtime each day from Monday-Friday. When Smart Scheduling, the scheduling engine will attempt to fit all jobs into regular working hours, but it will utilize Allowable Overtime for high priority jobs if time is limited.

The Users List has been updated with a new column entitled Working Hours, which displays the current Working Hours of the user. Due to the nature of the data, this column cannot be sorted, however new filter options have been added to make filtering more powerful than ever before.

Powerful new filters allow you to filter users by Working Day and Working Hours. See Table 1 below:

This provides the flexibility to make queries like: "show me users who are working on Monday and starting at 9.00am"; or "show me users who are not working on Sunday". The real power of the filters is when combined with the Bulk Update feature.

You can update the Working Hours of multiple users at once, making it easy to change the working hours of techs that are on the same crew or work the same shifts. Fig. 7: Button to bulk-update Working Hours

Filter the list and select the users to be updated. Then click the Edit Working Hours button to open the dialog and set the new working hours for those users. Note, this action changes the Default Working Hours for the user. Temporary changes can be performed using Working Hours Exceptions, which is covered in the next section of this document.

In the real world, nothing stays the same. While it is useful to be able to specify a technician's Working Hours for each day of the week, technicians' shifts often change, or they may be on call periodically. These Exceptions can now be captured in FieldAware and will be displayed in the Scheduler view. They will also be taken into account by the optimization engine when running the Smart Scheduler.

The User Record now features a section for Working Hours Exceptions. If a technician needs to break out of their normal shift pattern temporarily, you can use the New Exception button to capture that change. Clicking the button displays a calendar which is used to set the duration of the exception, and the working hours from Monday to Sunday for the duration. You can create exceptions for ranges shorter than one week and only the changes that fall within that range will be applied.

You can create exceptions which overlap each other. This is useful for busy or unpredictable times of the year, like responding to emergencies. During such periods, technicians might be required to work longer hours than usual, and you want to model this without affecting any existing shift patterns which have been created. You can create exceptions to cover the emergency period, leaving the techs' underlying working hours unchanged. Exceptions will be listed in order in the User Record.

Because exceptions can overlap, there are rules for how they are sorted in the list – firstly they are sorted in ascending order by start date. If two exceptions have the same start date, they are sorted in ascending by end date. An exception comes into effect when 'now' falls within the exception. But due to overlaps, exceptions which are In Effect can become Interrupted. Interruptions are based on the following rules:

A technician cannot have two or more exceptions with the same start and end dates. When you try to do this, you will be warned of the conflict and offered to overwrite the existing or discard your work.

There is an Exceptions column in the Users List, making it easy to see if a technician has any upcoming shift changes without opening the User Record. If an exception is currently in effect, the Current Working Hours column shows the working hours right now, again making it easy to get a snapshot of the current state of play.

Technicians often work in teams of two or more, so they will be on the same shift rotations. The new Filtering and Bulk Update tools on the list make it easy to select techs who work the same shifts, and update thier shifts in bulk.

There are some gotchas to be aware of with this feature.

Timesheets
User Timesheets do not yet support this feature. In other words, neither Enhanced Working Hours nor Exceptions will be taken into account when calculating time. This work is on the roadmap and will be done in due course.
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Expired Exceptions
Expired Exceptions are not shown. However it is still possible to create exceptions in the past in order to capture an employee who worked additional hours on a previous day, or took time off at short notice.