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Sick days in period

Fires when an employee’s sick days inside a window add up to a set number.

This is the pattern no single absence ever reveals: repeated short absences. Someone off sick eight separate days over a year never triggers a long-absence alert, but the total is worth a conversation.

When to use

Use it for absence follow-up policies of the “more than N sick days in twelve months” kind, and for yearly absence budgets. Send it to the manager or to HR — not usually to the employee, who is rarely the one who acts on it.

For a single long absence, use Consecutive sick days instead.

Parameters

ParameterDescriptionDefault
DaysSick days inside the window that trigger the advisory.5
WindowRolling window keeps watching a moving period that ends today. Calendar year counts from 1 January.Rolling window
Window lengthHow many days a rolling window looks back over. Only shown for a rolling window.365
Partial daysWhether a half day of sickness counts as a whole day or as a half.Count as full days

How it works

Every night mTime counts each employee’s sick days inside the window, which always ends on the day of the check — sickness booked in the future is not counted.

The advisory is sent when the count reaches the threshold. It is sent once per crossing: while the same days stay in the window nothing more is sent, however many times the check runs. When older days fall out of the window and a later sick day pushes the count over again, that is a new crossing and a new email.

That is what makes a rolling window practical: an employee who stays above the threshold for months does not produce months of emails, but one who dips below and climbs back over is reported again.

If the nightly check could not run on the day the count crossed, it still sends for up to three days afterwards.

A calendar-year window behaves the same way and naturally re-arms in January.

Message

Leaving the subject and text empty sends:

{employee_name} has {days} sick days in the current period

{employee_name} has {days} sick days between {window_start} and {window_end}, reaching the threshold of {threshold}.

Available variables: {employee_name}, {workspace_name}, {date}, {days} (the count), {threshold}, {window_start} and {window_end}.

Examples

More than five sick days in twelve months

  1. Add an advisory and select the Sick days in period trigger
  2. Set Days to 5, leave Window on Rolling window and Window length at 365
  3. Turn on Manager as the recipient

A yearly absence budget

  1. Set Window to Calendar year
  2. Set Days to the budget

The count restarts on 1 January, so each year gets its own message.

Troubleshooting

IssueSolution
Nothing is ever sentCheck that your sick-leave activities are set to the Sickness category under SettingsActivities.
The count looks too highHalf days count as whole days unless you set Partial days to Count pro rata.
No new email even though the employee is still above the thresholdExpected: one email per crossing. A new one follows when the count drops out of the window and crosses again.
The count includes days from before the employee’s current absence policyThe window is a plain date range; it counts every sick day inside it regardless of which policy the absence was taken under.