Hi Everyone!
I’m Kira Kumin, a Senior Implementation Consultant at monday.com. I work with large monday.com accounts to find the best way to manage their workflows and help make their lives easier in any way possible :).
TL;DR:
Automatically link new leave requests to see how many vacation days an employee has left, and then go through your approval process.
When working with HR teams, one thing we always try to optimize is how you manage vacation requests. Many of my clients want to easily understand how many days left an employee has for vacation, and whether it can be approved or not.
Finally, with the release of our new automation recipe (which I have included below), it is possible to automate this process and see everything from one board 
:
I have created a video to explain how this works which I am happy to share with you so you can recreate this time-saving use case: See 2.5 min video here
How to implement:
After watching the video, here are the key steps to implement this process.
For this workflow to work, you will be working with 2 boards, a Vacation request board, and an Employee directory board. These boards are linked bi-directionally so that the Employee request board is always reflecting the latest vacation days for each employee, based on the requests made in the Vacation requests board.
Creating your Vacation Request board
Create your vacation request board with all the relevant columns based on what data you want to show when asking employees to make a request.
Required columns:
- Timeline column where your employees will request the period on which they will be on vacation.
- Status column for approval.
- People column, in this example, it is renamed as “Who”.
- Formula column to calculate the number of working days that your employee is requesting to take as vacation in the Timeline column. In this example it is called “Work Days Off”:
- Add the following formula to this column
WORKDAYS({Vacation dates#End},{Vacation dates#Start})
- Add another Formula column to calculate the vacation days that have been approved. In this example it is called “Approved days off”:
- Add the following formula to this column
IF({Approval}=“Approved”,{Work Days off},“0”)
- Add a Connected boards column and select your Employee Directory board (instructions on how to build this below).
- Make sure to check the box to create a two-way sync, which will also add a Connected boards column automatically to the Employee directory board and connect it back to the Vacation requests board.
- Add a Mirror column and mirror the “Days left” column from your Employee directory board.
- Turn your board into a form and hide the relevant columns inside the form (depending on which questions you want your team to see when filling it out).
Creating your Employee Directory board
Create an employee directory board with all the relevant columns based on what data you want to show.
Required columns:
-
Add a People column here in order to match the People column in your vacation request board.
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Add a Numbers column to reflect how many Vacation Days each employee has, in this example it is called “Vacation Days”.
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You should have a connected boards column already added to your board from when you created a two-way sync from your Vacation Request board
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Add a mirror column and mirror the “Approved Days” from your vacation request board.
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Add a formula column to calculate how many days left the employee has, in this example, it is called “Days Left”:
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MINUS({Vacation Days},{Approved Days off})
Automatically connect every request to the relevant employee in the Employee Directory board:
And now for the magic part 
! From the automations center on your Vacation Requests board, add the following automations:
This means that each time a request is made, the employee who requests it will automatically be assigned in the People column on the Vacation Requests board.
Then, it will connect the item in the Vacation Request board to the relevant item for that employee in the Employee Directory.
If their vacation request is approved, the relevant work days will be deducted from their vacation Days Left, in the Employee Directory.
Hope you guys find it helpful and let me know if you have any questions!
If you want to send a screenshot of your formula, I will be able to help.
