The concept of the office-hour

Certain functions are only activated during our official office hours. Especially everything regarding handlng money should only be done in the office and must be properly documented (in the tools and depending on the section in a second written form, e.g. cash-book). Therefore these functions are only available during the office hours.

You are overrun by students and the official office hour is nearly finished - what to do?

You will receive a warning on nearly every tool page within the last 10 minutes. Within this time anyone working in the office can extend the current office hour. You should only do this if you are willing to stay longer and take care of more students.

In such a case you should do it immediately. If more than one person is working in the office ONLY ONE SHOULD EXTEND THE OFFICE HOUR. As you will need to talk with them, if you want to stay longer you can also easily agree who extends it!

Why does it say it closes at 20:30 although our office hour runs officially from 18:30 till 20:00?

As we know it's often hard to close the office on time by default, we internally prolong the office hour. This is also so you can do any corrections, comments for which you didn't have the time while the students had been there.

In case you use up that time, check out the chapter about extending the office hour.

When you view the office hour details, you will see the official times (open to the public) and the internally used times.

The respective detail page of a certain office hour do also provide more information (and even functions), than the overview tells you:

• The staff persons assigned for this office hours
   
• Comments (if any) regarding this office hour (e.g. if it is one outside our regular schedule, if we await something particular or if you need to consider something special). Comments are important outside/before the office hour, e.g. please take some barcode scanners from the other office, because we will await a lot of people.
   
• View if any special intructions were given for this office hour (also shown in the office-dash-board during the office hour).
  Instructions are different from comments and are not available for past office hours, because instructions are important during the office hour, e.g. if that person shows up, please also give back his sunglasses.
   
• The exact times of the office hour. Start and end time are normally the official times of the office-hour open to the public. In bracets () the internal time is given (the automatic extension of the office hour to continue working with the ESN office tools).
   
• "List ESNcards" gives you an overview, which ESNcards have been issued during that office hour. This is very useful to reconstruct not just the amout, but also individual ESNcards, if there was something faulty or if you want to count the amount of cards per staff member.
   
• View all the payments during that office hour, e.g. amount of cards with their prices, event transactions like participation fees and refunds. After office hour you always need to check, if all the money is correct, and therefore that nice overview helps a lot.
   

Some functions within the office hour details will just appear, if you have a certain role, e.g. office hour coordinator. Also some functions regarding events will just be available during office hours and just for the working staff within that certain office hour! It prevents a chaos in a coordinated organisation team - but: the options, how an event is organised are set by the event coordinator and are decided by the individual event organisers, because it's only them who knows how the particular event works and what are the needs! So, there is a sense in behind and you should really follow these, e.g. optional questions, which could influence the participation fee, payment rules like a down payment or paid waiting list spots and so on... If questions come up regarding events, always ask the event organiser and/or the event coordinator - and DO NOT simply decide by yourself!