When you configure a session so that employees bid sequentially, you define and generate the bidding windows for the session’s employees in the wizard’s Sequential Bidding Configuration screen.
Before You Begin: This screen is shown only if you selected Sequential in the Session Type drop-down list in the Vacation Bidding Session Details screen of the wizard.
The Sequential Bidding Configuration screen’s layout has some similarities to the wizard’s Verify Employee List screen. When the session’s calendar period contains more than one submission round, the screen contains a separate tab for each round. Like the Verify Employee List screen, this screen contains a Details panel and an Employee List section in each tab:
Details
In the Details panel, you configure the default bidding window that’s assigned to employees in the selected round. Your configuration must include:
- The date range in which employees’ bidding windows occur.
- The length of each bidding window.
- The eligible days of the week on which bidding windows can fall.
- The time range on eligible days when bidding windows are available (for example, from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM).
Note: In the Sequential Bidding Configuration screen, Dayforce shows dates and times based on the user’s time zone. For example, if a user in Canada adds a session and a user in Europe needs to edit the session, the default times configured by the Canadian user are shown in European time for the user in Europe.
To configure the eligible date range for employees’ bidding windows, enter dates in the Bidding Window Start and Bidding Window End fields. To set the default length of the bidding windows, configure the Time Increment and Unit settings:
- Time Increment: Enter a time value that represents the length of the session’s default bidding window, or select a value using the arrows.
- Unit: In the drop-down list, select Days or Hours to set the time unit specified in the Time Increment field. For example, when you enter 8 in the Time Increment field and select Hours in this drop-down list, the default bidding window lasts for 8 hours.
- Note: When Hours is selected in the Unit drop-down list, you can configure a bidding window in quarter-hour increments. For example, to configure a bidding window length of one hour and forty five minutes, enter 1.75 in the Time Increment field.
Use the Earliest Start and Latest End fields to set the time range in which bidding windows can fall on eligible days. For example, if you select 9:00 in the Earliest Start field and 17:00 in the Latest End field, Dayforce generates bidding windows only between 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM on eligible days.
In the Days of the Week section, select or clear the appropriate checkboxes for each day of the week that’s eligible or ineligible for bidding. Monday to Friday are enabled, by default, so that bidding windows are generated only from Monday to Friday.
Employee List
In the Employee List section, Dayforce lists the session’s employees based on their rank in the bidding hierarchy for the selected round:
When you’re configuring a new session for sequential vacation bidding, you can see which employees are included in the selected round in the Employee List section. By default, the employees aren’t assigned bidding windows. You can generate employees’ bidding windows automatically using the default details you configured in the Details panel, or you can create them manually.
Note: Even though you can manually create or edit bidding windows, they must adhere to the configuration limits that you configured in the Details panel. For example, bidding windows must follow one another in sequence (that is, the fourth bidding window can’t start earlier than the third bidding window) and must not violate your eligible days of the week configuration. Further, you can’t add a customized bidding window with a duration that’s less than the default bidding window duration (configured using the Time Increment and Unit settings).
To automatically generate the employees’ bidding windows using your default details, click Generate and make one of the following selections:
- Generate for current round: Generates bidding windows for employees in the selected round.
- Generate for all rounds: Generates bidding windows for employees in all rounds.
For example, in the screenshot above, an administrator configured the session’s bidding window duration to be 4 hours, eligible from 8:00 AM to 9:00 PM on Tuesday to Friday. Next, the administrator clicked Generate > Generate for current round so that Dayforce automatically created each bidding window for the selected round based on the limits configured in the Details panel. The application generated three bidding windows on the first day and determined that each eligible day supports only three 4-hour bidding windows between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM. As a result, the fourth bidding window for Xavier Hines was generated for the next day at 8:00 AM.
Alternatively, to manually create or edit bidding windows for employees, click the fields in the Bidding Window Start and Bidding Window End columns. After you click a cell, Dayforce shows date and time fields where you can configure the start and end day and time for the bidding window:
If necessary, you can create a CSV file containing your session’s bidding window details. To do so, click Export after you’ve generated or manually created bidding windows for your employees. The exported CSV file contains employee names and job assignments, and the dates and times of their bidding windows in both their local time zones and in UTC format: