Who this is for: Admin, Admin HR
Set up shift planning and time off policies to manage your employees' work schedules and time off requests.
This guide covers the topics from your second Kenjo implementation session.
Activate employees for shift planning
Before you can schedule a shift, each employee must be activated individually for scheduling. Until an employee is active, they don't appear in the Schedules view and you can't assign them any shifts.
To activate an employee:
Open the employee's profile and go to Actions.
Click Activate Shiftplan.
Set the location, the working area, and the role (you can also assign more than one role).
Tip:
This activation only needs to be done once per employee. Once activated, the employee stays available for scheduling in the following weeks too.
Create shifts
From Shiftplan > Schedules you can see all activated employees, with the hours already scheduled for each. You can switch between the weekly and monthly view at any time.
Create a shift by clicking on the calendar
Click directly on a day to open quick creation. You can define:
The start time, the end time, and the break duration.
The location, the role, and the employee.
The field with a star is required; the other fields are optional.
Create shifts in bulk and with templates
With the (+) button you can create several shifts at once: set the start time, end time, break, days of the week (for example Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Saturday), and select several employees at the same time. Kenjo automatically creates a shift for every combination of selected day and employee.
To reuse a recurring pattern, click New template, give it a template name (for example "morning driver"), and define the hours and break (for example 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM with a 30-minute break). The template you create can then be applied to any day in the planner.
Create a shift with the AI Assistant
Write a prompt in natural language (for example "Create a morning shift for Andrea on July 22 as a driver at the Berlin location") and the AI Assistant generates the matching shift. You can always edit it before publishing.
Manage conflicts and publish shifts
If the role assigned to a shift doesn't match the employee's role, Kenjo flags a conflict. This doesn't prevent the shift from being published: it's just a warning. You can filter the planner to show only shifts with conflicts.
Newly created shifts are only visible to admins. To make them visible to employees, click Publish: only then is the employee notified and the shift appears in their personal calendar.
From the Actions menu you can also clear the schedule for selected shifts to start over, without having to delete the entire plan.
Use open shifts
An open shift is a shift created without assigning it to any employee. Employees can apply to take it. You have two options for assignment:
Option | Behavior |
Require approval | The employee requests to work that shift, but an admin must approve it before it's assigned. |
Automatically assign to the first applicant | The shift is automatically assigned to the first employee who applies, with no approval needed. |
Open shifts are handy for covering a last-minute absence. If your organization doesn't need this feature, you can simply not create open shifts.
Set up shift planning settings
From Shiftplan > Settings you can customize:
Notifications: turn on automatic notifications to employees when you publish their shifts.
View options: choose whether to show the time or the duration of the shift, whether to show holidays and unavailability in the calendar, and whether to show actual attendance data to compare the plan with hours actually worked.
Locations, working areas, roles, and tags: add or remove the locations, working areas, roles, and tags used in scheduling. A new location must first be created in the Attendance section before it appears here.
Breaks: if enabled, the break is automatically deducted from the shift duration, so the plan shows the actual expected working time.
Swapping shifts: let employees access other employees' shifts (everyone's, or only specific employees') and swap them directly from the Kenjo mobile app.
Availability: if enabled, employees receive a periodic email (for example every two weeks) to indicate their availability or unavailability. This is informational only: it doesn't prevent you from scheduling an employee on a day marked as unavailable.
Conflicts & Automations: set the legal rest limits between two shifts and other automatic checks for overlapping shifts.
Capacity planning: a feature designed for organizations on an advanced pricing plan, to plan and monitor shift coverage throughout the week.
Review and manage time off requests
Managing time off is the most detailed part of Kenjo: it requires attention to entitlement accrual, balance carryover, and correctly configuring the hourly deduction.
In the Time Off section, the Personal tab only shows your own requests as an admin; the Company tab shows all policies and employee requests, with filters by leave type, company, division, team, office, and employee status.
In the Requests tab you can see the requests employees have submitted and accept or reject them. In the Overview tab you can see all requests with their status (submitted, approved, rejected, or cancelled) and filter by status and type.
Create a new time off policy
A time off policy defines the rules for a type of absence: who can request it, how the balance is calculated, and how it's deducted from the payslip. In Time Off > Settings you'll find two main categories, paid and unpaid, plus other default types for Italy. You don't need to configure all of them: only create the policies your company actually needs.
To create a policy, click Add new policy and set:
The policy's name (for example "Vacation"). You can't create two policies with the same name.
Visibility: if enabled, employees can see their colleagues' time off requests.
Entitlement defined in days or hours (usually in days).
Type: fixed (a specific number of days, for example 22 days a year for vacation) or unlimited (typical for sick leave).
Annual cycle: the date the entitlement renews every year (for example January 1st).
Linked document (optional): useful, for example, for sick leave, to request supporting documentation.
Set up entitlement accrual
Accrual determines when the employee receives the days of their entitlement. You have three options:
Method | Behavior (example with 22 days a year) |
Allocated at the start of the cycle | The employee receives all 22 days on January 1st. |
Monthly credit at the end of the month | The employee receives 1.83 days at the end of every month. |
Monthly credit at the start of the month | The employee receives 1.83 days at the start of every month. |
Apply extra leave for seniority
You can grant additional days based on years of service: for example, if an employee has worked at your company for 3 years, they can receive an extra 3 days of extra leave. This setting is optional: you can also skip it.
Set up proration
Proration proportionally reduces the entitlement of an employee who starts or ends their contract partway through the cycle, or who doesn't work full-time.
Proration basis | Available options |
Employee start date | No proration, daily proration, or monthly proration. Example: an employee who starts in August doesn't receive all 22 days, only those proportional to the remaining months of work in the year. |
Contract end date | Same logic, applied to the end of the contract: if the employee only works until March, they receive only the days proportional to that period. |
Employee's weekly hours (part-time) | Proration based on weekly working days or weekly working hours. An employee who works 60% or 80% of full-time hours receives, respectively, 60% or 80% of the entitlement. |
For part-time employees, proration based on weekly hours is more precise than proration based on days, because it exactly reflects the percentage of time worked.
Manage negative balance and carryover
Allow negative balance: if enabled, you can set a limit (for example 10 or 20 days) or leave it unlimited; if disabled, the employee can't go below zero available days.
Carryover: if enabled, it allows unused entitlement to be transferred to the next cycle, with a day limit (for example 10) or no limit, and with an optional expiry date (for example 3 months after the new cycle starts, by March 31st).
Round the balance to full days: available, but not recommended, because it makes it harder to know precisely how many days an employee has left.
Understand deduction logic
Deduction determines how many hours are subtracted from the employee's balance when they take a day off. This is the most critical setting to get right: an error here compromises correct payslip generation.
Deduction based on | Behavior |
Work schedule, with Shiftplan active | Uses the contractual hours for the hourly deduction (the ones in the employee's profile). This is a problem with irregular contracts, because Kenjo doesn't know which days were scheduled, unless you use shift planning. |
Work schedule, without Shiftplan | Uses the fixed work plan saved in the employee's profile. If the employee has an irregular schedule (for example working certain Saturdays), Saturday still counts as a non-working day in the profile, and the time off can't be recorded correctly on that day. |
Custom value (recommended if you don't use shift planning) | You set a fixed number of hours (for example 8 hours) for only the days that are actually worked. You must select only those days: if you also leave Saturday and Sunday selected while the employee doesn't work, Kenjo calculates 8 hours x 7 days = 56 hours instead of the correct 40 hours (8 hours x 5 days). So whenever you record this type of absence for an employee, you only need to choose the days the employee would have worked. |
Important:
If you use shift planning, deduction based on the work schedule is always the safest choice, because Kenjo uses the actually scheduled shifts instead of a fixed plan. An incorrectly configured deduction leads to overpaying or underpaying on the payslip: always check this setting before activating a policy.
Set up requests, approval, and restrictions
For time off requests you have two options: turn on required approval if you want the employee to submit the request in Kenjo and you accept or reject it; turn it off if you'd rather have only Admin and Admin HR create or edit requests, while employees contact you directly.
You can also:
Block requests during the employee's probation period.
Allow employees to request a half day.
Add a restriction to temporarily block requests on a policy during busy periods (for example the whole month of December).
Assign the policy to employees and adjust balances
After creating a policy, go to the Employees tab and click Assign employees (or Add all to assign it to the whole company). Set the effective date: you can choose the employee's start date, the cycle start date, or a custom date. Kenjo automatically calculates the days owed based on this date.
To manually adjust an employee's balance, go to Time Off, Company tab, and search for the employee. Find the entry for the absence type you're interested in and scroll right: you'll find the three dots. Click the three dots and select Adjust balance. From there you can add or remove days and enter a reason for the change.
Create additional policies and check the support resources
The process for creating any policy is essentially the same. Fixed-day policies (for example vacation) all follow the same configuration logic; likewise, unlimited-day policies (for example sick leave) are all set up the same way. In both cases, pay particular attention to two aspects: the deduction setup and the approval setup, since these are the most delicate and error-prone points. Also remember that you can't create two policies with the same name.
Before finalizing your policies, check the dedicated articles and videos in our Help Center: click the blue icon in the bottom right corner of the app. If our virtual assistant Kira can't solve your question, write that you want to talk to a person to get connected with the technical team.
Frequently asked questions
Is a newly created shift immediately visible to the employee?
No. A shift is only visible to admins until you click Publish. Only after publishing does the employee get notified and see the shift appear in their calendar.
What happens if the role assigned to a shift doesn't match the employee's role?
Kenjo shows a conflict as a warning, but this doesn't prevent you from publishing the shift anyway.
Do I have to configure every absence type available in Kenjo?
No. Only configure the policies your company actually needs; you're not required to activate the other types.
How do I avoid miscalculating hours when I use a custom deduction value?
Select only the days the employee actually works. If you also include non-working days, for example Saturday and Sunday, the system calculates excess hours and the payslip will be wrong.
Can I create two time off policies with the same name?
No. Kenjo doesn't allow you to save a new policy if an active policy with the same name already exists.