Filters Use Cases & FAQ

Updated by Daniel Sjögren

Below you will find some of the most frequent filter use cases and how to solve them. In addition, you will also find the most Frequently Asked Questions regarding filters.

We recommend you to set up your favorite filters for your most common tasks (and then name the filters accordingly). For example, the "Attest" favorite filter may contain schedule components shifts, absence and punches. Depending on how you work within your organization, unattested punches and punches with warnings can also be interesting to add to the same favorite filter or an additional favorite filter. 

Frequent filter use cases and how to solve them

Finalizing my schedule prior to publishing

Case: You've just rolled out a base schedule - and possibly run auto-assign - or run auto-schedule for the period of time you'll be publishing to your employees. You now want to review the Schedule and make any relevant changes.

How to:

  1. In Schedule, set the date span and view mode to the period that best corresponds to the period you're working on (Day / Week / Month / Custom).
  2. Turn on the statistics tab, and set the statistics view mode (sum / table / chart) as well as the statistics variables for what is relevant to you.
  3. In the display options, configure the following to what best matches your needs:
    1. The employee metric calculation period (Selected period / Schedule period / Balance period)
    2. The metric Scheduled hours / Nominal hours is likely to be the relevant one in this specific case for close to all users as this measure reflects the number of scheduled hours in relation to the number of hours the employee is entitled to work according to their agreement.
    3. Metric display mode. The By agreement option is recommended if there are employees for which more than one agreement will be active during the period in question, including if this is due to an agreement change without agreements overlapping.
    4. Calendar weeks. Depending on your company's ways of working and/or geographic location, you may or may not be finding it helpful for calendar weeks to be reflected in the Schedule.
  4. Ensure all filter groupings are ticked. If you prefer, you may also choose to only tick shifts and tasks for a more minimalistic view, but this comes with the caveat of you proceeding without taking into account absences, notices of interest, availability, or unavailability.
  5. In the filters, configure which employees you wish to display. As a first step, you're likely to want to only show employees that have an item in their schedule in the present period. Therefore, in People > Employee has, select Items in current view. Review the scheduled hours / nominal hours metric for each one of your employees to ensure each employee is scheduled the number of hours you want them to be. Make manual adjustments if necessary, especially considering any bank holidays, special events or similar deviations in the period. Tip: save the filter in its current state as a saved view so you can easily re-use it every time you're carrying out this work task.
  6. Close the filters panel to review your statistics to ensure your schedule is correctly meeting the quota of scheduled hours you're entitled to for the period in question. Make manual adjustments if necessary.
  7. To ensure you've got adequate coverage on any kind of dimension that might matter to you - such as shift section or task section, or maybe shift type or task type respectively - you may filter specifically on the values relevant to you.
  8. In the filters panel, in People > Employee has, remove the Items in current view value and select Empty schedule instead. Verify that these should de facto have an empty schedule in the period you're preparing to publish.
  9. You're now ready to publish the schedule - just ensure you're following any policies your organization may or may not have regarding the publishing of schedules.

Finding who to assign unassigned shifts to

Case: I only want to see unassigned shifts and Notice of Interests, or Availability together to be able to “match” employees with shifts. For that reason, the only employees I want to see are those with either a completely empty schedule or with a notice of interest or availability.

How to:

  1. Set your view mode to "Day".
  2. Ensure that all grouping checkboxes are unticked other than that of Notice of interest,Shifts, and Availability.
  3. In Shifts > Shift status, select the shift status “unassigned shifts".
  4. In People > Employee has, select Items in current view as well as Empty schedule.
  5. Use the Qmail-in-Schedule feature to reach out to said employees.

Planning the summer holidays

Case: Our employees have until April 1 to submit their paid time off requests for the months of July and August. It's now April 2 and I want to get as good an overview of the schedule and requests as possible so that I can proceed to process the requests in question.

How to:

  1. In Schedule, set the date span and view mode to the period that best corresponds to the period you're working on. In this case, it's likely to be Custom - July 1 until August 31.
  2. Turn on the statistics tab, set the statistics view mode (sum / table / chart) as well as the statistics variables relevant to you. This is likely to include Absence hours and either Scheduled hours incl. absence or Scheduled hours excl. absence for the large majority of users.
  3. In the display options, configure the following to what best matches your needs:
    1. The employee metric calculation period (Selected period / Schedule period / Balance period).
    2. The metric Scheduled hours / Nominal hours is likely to be the relevant one in this specific case for close to all users as this measure reflects the number of scheduled hours in relation to the number of hours the employee is entitled to work according to their agreement.
    3. Metric display mode. The By agreement option is recommended if there are employees for which more than one agreement will be active during the period in question, including if this is due to an agreement change without agreements overlapping.
    4. Calendar weeks. Depending on your company's ways of working and/or geographic location, you may or may not be finding it helpful for calendar weeks to be reflected in Schedule.
  4. In the filters panel, untick only the Absence requests and the Absences groupings. (Tip: save this view as your Paid time off planning view.)
  5. Review the number of employees that have applied for paid time off and take into consideration any already approved absences - such as parental leave, leave of duty, or paid time off. Approve or deny the absence requests according to company and/or collective bargaining agreement policies. When approving, choose to either delete, reassign or delete the absence shifts.
  6. Clear the filters. Review your schedule to ensure the hours add up.

Attestation

Case: I want to apply the manager's approval to payroll items.

How to:

  1. In Schedule, set the date span and view mode to the period that best corresponds to the period you're working on. This is likely to depend on your company's internal attestation policies and processes.
  2. Turn on the statistics tab, set the statistics view mode (sum / table / chart) as well as the statistics variables relevant to you. This is likely to include Scheduled hours incl. absence or Scheduled hours excl. absence as well as Worked hours incl. absence or Worked hours excl. absence for the large majority of users.
  3. In the display options, configure the following to what best matches your needs:
  4. The employee metric calculation period (Selected period / Schedule period / Balance period).
    1. The metric. Depending on your overtime/time off in lieu/minus time methods, any of Worked hours / Nominal hours, Worked hours / Scheduled hours, Worked hours / Rolled out hours is likely to be the relevant one for you.
    2. Metric display mode. The By agreement option is recommended if there are employees for which more than one agreement will be active during the period in question, including if this is due to an agreement change without agreements overlapping.
    3. Calendar weeks. Depending on your company's ways of working and/or geographic location, you may or may not be finding it helpful for calendar weeks to be reflected in Schedule.
  5. As a first step, ensure there aren't any absence requests in the period you're about to attest. These should have been either denied or approved as the period in question has now passed. Do this by unticking all groupings except for Absence requests. Now, filter on People > Employee has > Items in current view. (Tip: save this as a saved view for future reference.)
  6. Next, ensure there aren't any punches missing altogether. Do this by ensuring all groupings are ticked and filtering on Shifts > Warnings > Punch missing.
  7. Next, ensure that all payroll items in the period have been attested by the employee.
  8. Ensure the following groupings are ticked: Shifts, Tasks, Punches, Absences.
    1. Filter on Punches > Attest > Employee approval missing and People > Employee has > Items in current view. Depending on your company's policies, Quinyx will or will not be configured to auto-attest absences. If this is not the case for you, you need to also filter on Absences > Attest > Employee approval missing. (Tip: save this as a saved view for future reference.)
    2. Depending on your company's policies, you're either able to attest any missing employee attests yourself, or you need to inform your employees about the need to do so yourself.
  9. Next, proceed to process any highlighted payroll items worth your attention. These are items your employer has chosen to configure as generating a warning in your schedule in Quinyx.
  10. Ensure the following groupings are ticked: Shifts, Tasks, Punches, Absences.
    1. Filter on Shifts > Warnings > Shifts with warnings and remove the Punch is missing option. This will highlight any shifts with warnings. Note that shifts only carry these warnings in the case of certain bank holiday rules so this step may or may not apply to your case in the first place. Clear any question marks as needed. The Time card feature is likely to help you in doing so (Tip: save this as a saved view for future reference). Now clear the Shifts > Warnings field altogether.
    2. Filter on Punches > Warnings > Punches with warnings and also on Absences > Warnings > Absences with warnings. Clear any question marks as needed. The Time card feature is likely to help you in doing so. Tip: save this as a saved view for future reference.
      Depending on your preferences, you can either attest each highlighted item one-by-one or use any of the batch attest features in Schedule as the latter will take your schedule filters into account. Now clear the Punches > Warnings field as well as the Absences > Warnings fields altogether.
    3. Review the scheduled vs worked time of the period in its entirety. The Time card and statistics are likely to help you in doing so.
  11. You know you're done attesting the period you're currently viewing when there's a green circle around each employee's avatar in the left-hand margin of the schedule. That in turn means this period is ready to be transferred to payroll by the Quinyx users in your organization with the required Quinyx permissions to do so.

Filters Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Can we create global filters for everyone?

A: Currently all users have to create their own filters. However, some version of global filters is likely to be added in the future. 

Q: Can we filter and schedule on 3 locations at the same time?

A: You can combine the schedules of several locations in the same view by selecting the district, but you can't currently filter for specific units in the district. Scheduling is still done on a unit level. You can filter on people who belong to a certain unit.

Q: Can I filter on tasks?

A: Yes, but you need to also filter on shifts for the tasks to appear. If you only filter on tasks nothing will appear.

Q: When filtering for unassigned shifts and certain shift types the Schedule will display so many unwanted items, like absences, or employees that don't have the certain shift type I've filtered on. From other software solutions and/or e-commerce sites I've used, I'm used to getting specifically what I've filtered on. Why isn't this the case with Quinyx?

A: The short answer is that Schedule includes many different types of objects and dimensions, and depending on the use case at hand, you actually want it to act in different ways. For instance, our filters used to work in another way, f.ex. filtering on an employee would make the unassigned shifts disappear. We got feedback from users on a daily basis because they couldn't show one employee with the unassigned shifts and notices of interest which they wanted to do when assigning unassigned shifts.

There are cases where you need the existing logic, and there are others where you want "everything else to disappear automatically". We user-tested a solution with a selection of customers where you could toggle those two types of logic, but the feedback was unanimous it was far too complicated for managers to learn to use. That's why we have parked that idea as something we might revisit once there is functionality in place for Quinyx superusers to configure filters centrally. In theory, the superusers could then set the logic needed for each saved view and then send it out. That said, we would still need to look into the actual feasibility of this. In short, this topic is parked until further notice for those reasons.

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