SMS Time Off Notifications

Inspiration

What it does

This is an example front end where the user doesn't need to "sign in." They're automatically logged in via their cell phone number (hopefully the Xero API has this functionality, given the organization's ID).

What it does is send out a text message to everyone on the same team to fill in at work. Say your company has a manager and some employees working at a Jetpack store. It's really busy and someone calls in with an emergency. Now your manager is making calls to find a replacement! I've seen this happen at work many times. So not only are you down the person who can't come in to work, you're down a manager for several hours while he or she tries to find a replacement. With this, everyone gets the SMS notification asking to fill in (even if they don't have a smartphone, because all cell phones get SMS. And SMS notifications are higher priority notifications than apps). You could still have managers approve the request to fill in, but they could do it via sms ("Reply 1234 to approve Tyler's request to fill in").

Thank you for your consideration.

How I built it

I've built a time off SMS notification system several times now, including the entire employee back end. Choosing an up-to-date framework and handling the log in system would take more time than is left in this hack-a-thon. Instead, I created a well documented front end with source code included.

As of the time of writing, the 'time off' section of xero.com is currently down, and there is no employee portal. If that changes before the finish of the hack-a-thon, I'll update this.

The front end was built from scratch, including the hour calculation function, the date function, and UI design. I added comments to almost every single line of code.

Challenges I ran into

You're going to want to group people based on the part of the store they work in. I found the best way to do this is automatically build 5 or 10 groups for them (e.g. "Group 1", "Group 2", and so on). Maybe let them rename the groups or something. Basically if you add a "Select a group" drop down to your 'Add Employee' form, you could accomplish this with grocery stores, gyms, restaurants, and so fourth.

What I learned

Full stack development

Some UI Benefits

Notice the "I haven't been scheduled" option? If selected, the text messages won't be sent to the whole team. It will just do a normal time off request. Also there's a lot of love that went in to this design. For example, the day starts at 12:30am instead of midnight, to avoid confusion. The labels are the actual words people used to request time off ("What time do you work until?" "What time do you start?"), so it has strong information architecture. Also the employee doesn't need to sign in, assuming there's a custom domain to the employee portal. As of the time of writing this, the xero employee portal for time off requests isn't online.

What's next for SMS Time Off Notifications

The Time Off portal on xero is down, so I don't have much to work with, but modifying a back end (for sending/receiving sms) should take one or two days (I'm speaking from experience). Twilio can SMS forward to xero.com/endpoint, find all users, usersArr.forEach(sendSMS), sendSMS(){msg: 'To pick up a shift on '+today's date+' from 9 to 5, reply 1234 to this message. Text STOP to no longer receive notifications.'). Really simple stuff for a coder, now that the design is done.

Built With

• twilio
• your-api