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Setting up working patterns
Dana Smith avatar
Written by Dana Smith
Updated over 5 months ago

Working patterns within Breathe are created so the system knows how many days (or hours) to deduct from holiday allowances, or to log as sick days.

This means that Breathe can take care of the calculations for you, and reduce your HR admin by giving your team visibility over their remaining holiday.

Please note:

  • Working patterns won't change/pro rata holiday allowance.

  • If your team work irregular patterns, skip ahead - we've got you covered.

What's included in this guide:

Where to start?

Firstly, you'll need to set up a working pattern. You can create as many working patterns as you like - so each employee could have their own individual one, if necessary.

You can create these by heading to:

Configure > Settings > Working patterns > + > enter hours worked on each day.

Please note: If you have employees that work irregular days or hours, you can jump ahead to find out more.

You can also set a working pattern as default - meaning this will be automatically assigned to any new starters.

To edit or delete a working pattern, click on the pencil or bin icon next to it:

Please note: You won't be able to edit or delete a working pattern if it's assigned to a user and they've booked holiday against it.

You can either create a new working pattern to assign them to, or the admin can purge the holiday data from the person under People > Data > Purge data. Please note that purging data is permanently deleting data (which isn't recoverable - so make sure you've got records of everything you need to before doing this).

How to assign a working pattern

You can assign a working pattern either individually or in bulk.

To assign individually, just head to the employee's profile and head to the 'More' tab > Work patterns and holiday allowances and then assign a working pattern.

If you have a working pattern to assign to just a few people, you can assign in bulk using the bulk/mass assign feature:

Tip: You can assign other things in bulk here too - explore the options in the drop-down menu.

What about irregular working patterns?

We understand that you may have people who don't work the same hours/days each week, so below are some of our suggestions on how best to set them up in Breathe.

My people work the same days but different hours

Example:

If they work the same days but different hours, a working pattern can be set up to reflect this.

My people work the same hours but different days/zero hour contracts

Example:

If some people work the same hours each week, but different days or work on zero-hours contracts, the first thing we suggest is to tick the 'ignore working pattern' setting.

Ticking this means that instead of Breathe looking at the working pattern to see how much holiday should be deducted, it will ask you to manually input what should be deducted from the allowance (with every leave request, for example).

You can ignore the working pattern by heading to their Profile > More > Working pattern and holiday allowance and tick the box to 'ignore working pattern'.

Here, you can also enter an estimated number of weekly hours worked (in the 'hours' and 'minutes' boxes) to display a figure on the employee's profile.

Find out more about this setting in the guide below:

Important: We recommend that you create a working pattern of all the possible days and hours the employee could work and assigning it to them. This will then be used for when they're logging sickness.

For more information on irregular working patterns, here's a useful guide:

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