Groups are used to select similar types of employees for viewing and reporting purposes. Groups can be any type of classification that suits your organisation. For instance, they can be names of departments, skill types or work patterns. You can then decide how and where this Group is used within Focus.

This guide will look at:

• Creating a new Group
• Creating an Absence Profile

Creating a new Group

1. Select ‘System’ from the Menu Bar.
2. Select ‘Groups’ from the System Tree.
3. Select ‘Create New’.
4. Give your Group a ‘Name’.
5. If required, choose a colour to further identify your Group (eg. in the Employee Tree).
6. Tick ‘Absences’ if you wish the Group to also be used as an Absence Profile (see Creating an Absence Profile).
7. Tick ‘Rota’ if you wish the Group to be visible within the Rota.
8. Tick ‘Self Service’ if you wish the Group to be visible to those using the Availability screen in Self Service. They must also be a member of the Group.
9. Save.

Creating an Absence Profile

Absence Profiles are a special type of Group. They have the same attributes as a regular Group with the addition of a calendar screen. This can be used to define a range of absences and any member of that Group will have those absences applied to them. A typical example would be to create an Absence Profile that has every public holiday for the year ahead assigned as a day of annual leave. Or perhaps a department has an away day every year where the employees won't clock in or out, but you want to record that it is a recognised absence.

1. Tick ‘Absences’ - a separate Absences tab will appear under General.
2. Select the ‘Absences’ tab.
3. Select the year that you wish to create the profile for.
4. In the Public Holidays drop-down menu, select a country. The public holidays for the year and country that you choose will automatically appear.

5. Select ‘All’ and and ‘Add/Edit’ if you wish to include all of the public holidays in the profile. Alternatively, select the individual public holidays you wish to include and then ‘Add/Edit'.
6. As with all absence bookings, select the ‘Reason’ (eg. Public Holiday) and, if required, make any other necessary adjustments to cost centres, rates, totals etc.
7. Save and Close.

Other absences can be added to the Calendar by selecting the individual days and following the same process.

Group membership dates are important with Absence Profiles. If an employee joins a Group halfway through the year, then they will only be assigned absences from their joining date onwards. 

Additional information

Once created, you are ready to add any relevant employees to the Group. This is done either individually in the ‘Groups’ tab of the Employee Form or via Group Actions, where multiple employees can be added at the same time.