Reminders
Updated
by
Daniel Sjögren
Reminders is a functionality designed for managers to configure conditions by which the system should send users automatic messages whenever a user fulfills a specific set of criteria.
For example - Ida is a manager at the local surf and turf taco shack. She loves time reporting, but hates chasing her employees around at the end of each month to attest their time. So instead she sets up a reminder, so that:
- 5 days before the end of the month;
- A reminder will be sent via Qmail with a custom message;
- To each employee who hasn’t attested their time;
These employees will then receive an automatic message at the defined time thus saving her the hassle of manually figuring out who has/hasn’t attested their time, and running around after each and every one of them.
Reminder types
Using Reminders users can create automated reminders based on different criteria, to different users groups, to create new insights for you and your business. With Version 1, we've released our first reminder type but we'll continuously build up our reminder suite with future iterations of reminders.
Attest missing
This reminder type should send a reminder to users if either they - or the employees they manage - have not attested their time as they get closer to the end of the month.
In doing so, a manager can set up automatic reminders to help encourage/push their employees to attest their time earlier rather than later, and understand when their employees have successfully attested their time - they by enabling them to be more effective and timely with their payroll management.
Within this reminder type, there are two sub-types:
- Employee Attest Missing
- Manager Attest Missing
Employee attest missing
Employee Attest Missing is the most straightforward reminder of the bunch. If configured this will check for any missing employee attests at the defined time.
For example, you could set up a reminder where 5 days before the end of the month the system should automatically send out a Qmail to any employee that has missing attests on any punch or leave.
Meaning, as a manager, you could set up this cascading series of reminders, so that:
- 10 days before the end of the month
- 5 days before the end of the month
- 1 day before the end of the month
The system will automatically check to see which employees have any missing attests on a punch or leave and send out a reminder to each to attest their time.
Manager attest missing
Manager Attest Missing which, if configured, will check for any missing manager attests at the defined time.
For example, after the Employee Attest Missing reminder 5 days before the end of the month, you could set up a second Manager Attest Missing reminder 3 days before the end of the month to also check whether all the managers have successfully attested all the employees shifts/absences from their side as well.
By setting up some combination of these two reminder sub-types you, as a manager, could run this check to verify that there are no missing attests for either employees or managers, and thus can be more confident that you’re ready to start prepping for your payroll.
How to configure reminders
Reminders are nice and easy to use. When configuring reminders, simply fill in the basic criteria for the selected reminder type and the defined recipient group will receive automatic notifications based on the time or event-based criteria defined.
The below example is using the reminder type Employee Attest Missing:
- Navigate to Account settings > Advanced settings > Reminders.
- Click the Add New button and populate the General Information (that is, information common to all reminder types). The selected reminder type will determine what additional fields are available, once you hit Save and unlock the second Reminder Rules panel.
- In the Reminder Rules panel you can configure rules specific to the selected reminder type.
- One of the last steps is to determine whether or not you want to “Activate” your new reminder. If so, reminders will go live as soon as you hit Save. If unselected, it will be marked as "Inactive" until you choose to activate it, almost like a Draft state. Similarly, if you ever want to pause an active reminder for any reason, you can do so here.
- After you hit Save you’ll get a nice overview of your new reminder! If you want to change anything, you can always edit it accordingly.
- Done! If you go back to the overview, you can see a nice list of all reminders set up for your company.
Troubleshooting & common questions
Q: What about the reminders I've set up in Classic?
A: With version 1, we are going out with the new version of Attest reminders (like we had in Classic). The important thing to note here however is that:
- Quinyx (Neo) reminders are not backward compatible with Classic reminders.
- It won't break the Classic ones, but those will continue to run alongside the Quinyx (Neo) ones.
- This means that for any customer using Classic reminders, the question/request may come up to remove them so that there's no conflicting, or repetitive information with the newly created Quinyx ones.
Therefore, in the short term if you would like to have an old reminder created or removed, contact your support contact as you do today. In the long term, we will start a more formal migration project after the first release to start identifying and systematically reach out to customers who are still using the old Classic reminders.
Q: Where do users receive the reminder?
A: In the past, a user could receive a reminder via SMS, Email or Qmail.
We’ve simplified this, and instead limited reminders to being sent to Qmail (with version 1). So once a reminder is sent, it will appear in the affected user's Qmail inbox with the Reminder label.
We will investigate additional output types in Reminders - Phase 2, such as Messenger, as well as how to better visualize Reminders in the web-portal. However, this is yet to be confirmed.
Q: Are reminders sent to everyone? Is there a way to filter the recipient groups?
A: With version 1, reminders are configured globally.
Meaning that - for ease of use, and for a consistent experience across your company, reminders will be configured and sent to your whole company in a uniform manner.
Q: What exactly does the active vs inactive status mean?
A: When creating or managing your reminders, there is the option to mark a reminder as Active.
This allows you to save a new reminder as a (almost) “Draft” status, or you can pause an existing reminder if say - you don’t want certain reminders to run for the summer, or other select periods.
The status is visualized in the edit state, as well as flagged in the overview so you can easily see whether each reminder is set as Active or Inactive.
Q: Who can create and edit reminders?
A: Under Account Settings > Roles you can define which roles should have read, versus write, versus edit permissions for different employee groups.
Q: Who receives the reminders?
A: The available recipients can differ based on the selected reminder type. Some reminder types are more applicable to different recipient groups than others - so we designed this scalable option to allow for a single group when necessary, while others may have multiple.
Below is a breakdown for the recipient groups per reminder type:
Reminder type | Recipients | What does this mean? |
Employee attest missing | Affected employees | When the reminder is triggered (say at 9:00 on the 25th of the month), every employee who has missing attests on any punch or leave. If a employee has already successfully attested their time before the 25th of the month, then they will not receive a reminder. |
Manager attest missing | Affected managers | When the reminder is triggered (say at 9:00 on the 25th of the month), every manager who has missing attests on any punch or leave. If a manager has already successfully attested their time before the 25th of the month, then they will not receive a reminder. |
