Zoho Connect: Minimal Holiday Booking System
Zoho Connect is a great tool to use for many businesses as it provides a wide range of functionality including task management, discussions and more. It also features a version of Zoho Creator, Zoho’s zero-code app creation platform with enough usage limits to get good usage out of it. For example, an employee holiday booking system is more than possible with little effort.
Note that this tutorial focuses around a very minimalistic and simple approach to booking holidays which would only realistically work in a small organisation. For larger organisations, or those with a more detailed process we would much more heavily reconmend investing in Zoho People.
This application, by default doesn’t have any access controls so all employees can see each other’s entitlement. Depending on your requirements you may choose to alter this.
Building the Zoho Connect App
You will first need to ensure you are logged in to your Zoho Connect instance as a user which is allowed to create Company Apps, and have that feature enabled.
Once done so you can create a new application from scratch and give it an appropiate name with the Form Name we’ll start with as “Book a Holiday”. This is the form which will store all of the requests in the system. This form at the moment just needs a Start and End date. We’ll add the final Lookup field in a moment.
Next we’ll create a new form called “Holiday Entitlements”. This will contain the total amount of holiday each employee has for the current year, and their remaining allowance. At the start of the new holiday year, a manual task of increasing all of the allowances for the next year will be required, however this can be different for each employee allowing for pro-rated entitlements easily etc.
We can now go back to the original “Book a Holiday” form, and add a lookup to the new Holiday Entitlement form so that when booking a holiday, we can pick which item to remove it from. This does require trust from employees, although in a small company where this type of system would be used this should not be much of an issue.
Now we will add an approval to Booking a Holiday. This process means when an employee submits their holiday request, it is automatically sent to the correct person for approval by Zoho Connect.
If Approved, we can run a custom process which will deduct this holiday from their allowance. With this, we will write a small amount of Deluge code which processes this. Depending on your requirements you could expand this to send out emails to the parties involved, create a calendar event, or other items. This code is as follows:
// Calculate number of days
days = input.Start.workdaysBetween(input.End);
// Add it to your entitlement
entitlement = Holiday_Entitlement[ID = input.Who];
entitlement.Used_Days=entitlement.Used_Days + days;Code language: Lua (lua)After all this, you should have a simple holiday booking system. Alternatively, you can get the DS file which you can import into Zoho Connect to get a pre-built version ready for you to modify.
Conclusion
Through this brief tutorial we have used Zoho Connect‘s Company App function to build a bespoke Employee Holiday booking system. While very basic, for those who are looking to slightly step away from a spreadsheet based process this may still provide the level of control required. Also with it being built in Zoho’s App building technology, this can be easily adapted to your needs.
Want to speak to us about your bespoke Zoho Creator needs? Get in touch.
