Dear clients,
for the new year 2020, we have set ourselves a number of major topics that we will introduce in the GigPlaner over the coming months. To get started we have another new version for you, which will be available as usual starting tomorrow. It will include some enhancements in the rights management as well as support for a new working time model, which is currently being used more and more in the industry.
Parallel to these developments, we are already preparing for the next major trade fair – Prolight + Sound in Frankfurt. There we will have some major innovations to see this year – this is what we can already reveal. But first of all I would like to present the latest innovations to you in the context of this update information.
We wish you continued success with GigPlaner
Sven Schlotthauer
New features for time recording
For many years now, the event industry has been preoccupied with the subject of pseudo self-employment. Due to the widespread use of freelancers there is regularly a legal uncertainty, which is now partly countered by changing to permanent employment with new working time models. In the future, GigPlaner will directly support such working time models, and from now on "half holidays" can also be managed and stored in the system.
The day-based working time model
More and more companies in the event industry are hiring their previous freelancers as permanent employees in order to obtain legal certainty about the status of these persons. In most cases, however, these employees want to retain the freedom to work for other companies. This is achieved through contracts in which the employee owes the company a certain number of days per month or year.
In the statement & time recording periods, there is now the option of storing these target days under the statement type "Time recording". From this point on, a second account is managed for the employee in the same way as the flexitime account, in which he can see directly whether he has already worked the days owed or how many days are still outstanding.
Whether a day is credited fully or only partially (for example, half) can be controlled by the statement factor in the job. This can be changed globally (for all employees of a job) or, from this version on, for each employee individually (using the € symbol). Note that an employee may be credited more than one day if he or she is booked for several jobs on one day. If necessary, you can adjust the statement factor for this employee manually, since the system cannot recognize what is the right total factor for this employee.
The flexitime account will be continued in parallel, and these employees should definitely record their working hours in full in order to comply with the legal documentation requirements. Any resulting time debt or time credit compared to the days worked should be cleared at the end of the year. There should be a corresponding contractual provision to ensure legal certainty in this respect as well.
"Half" Official Holidays
In many companies, certain days such as Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve are granted as half paid holidays in addition to the usual holiday allowance. Such a model could already be mapped up to now, but for this purpose a corresponding half-day holiday had to be created for each employee. From this version on, this is also possible for official holidays. You can now specify how many hours are to be credited for a official holiday.
User groups
The authorization concept has again been extended in this version by some additional configuration options:
Additional rights for functions in Jobs & Projects
Some functions in projects and jobs can now be additionally assigned or restricted. For example, there is a separate right for deleting jobs / projects and a right for editing target and / or actual times of other employees.
Own rights for requests & bookings
With the last update we have created a possibility to disable the functions for request and booking, although an employee has write permissions for a job or event. With this version it is now also possible to assign this authorization to a user group if he only has read rights for a job or event. An employee can then also request and/or book other people without write permission for a job or event.
Access to statement & time recording periods
Access to statement & time recording periods for employees, freelancers and subcontractors can now be controlled individually – just like access to contact persons, documents, notes and other objects.
Public external calendars
The creation of public third-party calendars (or the possibility to mark your own third-party calendars as "public") can now also be permitted or prohibited in the form of a right.
Further optimizations
- Documents can now also be stored for vehicles.
- In the statistics there are new lists for jobs according to turnover and sales prices.
- For free text mails, the complete information (including the sub-job list) of a job or project is now optionally sent with the mail. These contents can also be changed in the administration via the configuration of the request and booking mails.
- If an administrator or scheduler changes the holiday request or entry of an employee, the employee will be informed about this change by e-mail in the future.
- Whether an employee receives e-mails about cancellations was previously linked to the sending of booking e-mails. In future, employees will be able to decide separately whether they want to receive cancellation or booking e-mails.
- The retention period of documents in jobs can now be extended to up to 545 days if they are to be deleted automatically.
Prolight + Sound 2020
This year, we will again be represented with a booth at Prolight + Sound and. Under the motto "Crew Management made easy" we will present our vision of the future of personnel planning in the event industry. We are already working hard to complete all the innovations by the time the fair opens and look forward to welcome you to our booth B68 in Hall 12.0 from 31.03. – 03.04.
