Trading
You can select one of two views in the Trading module's drop-down menu; Proposals or My Trades. If trading is permitted at your site, you can use these views to obtain more convenient schedules by trading with other agents. This help topic first describes the entire trading process (How Trading Works) and then breaks it down into steps (Requirements for a Successful Trade).
Using the Trading views, you can:
- Respond to other agents' personal or community trade proposals.
- Review or cancel your own trade proposals.
- Review or cancel your responses to other agents' proposals.
- View other agents' schedules or schedule details.
How Trading Works
A trade can include up to six full weeks of schedule days. Every schedule trade requires:
- One agent's proposal for a trade. The proposal specifies which schedule days this agent wants to trade.
- Another agent's response to that proposal. The response indicates this agent's willingness to accept the proposed trade.
- An approval. The approval can be either automatic (by WFM) or explicit (by a supervisor).
For some trades, the proposing agent must explicitly accept the response before submitting the trade for approval. This is always true for community proposals, which are offered to all agents within a team or site.
If a trade is approved, it executes: both agents' schedules change to reflect it, and the trade no longer appears in the trading views. However, all of your own proposals still appear on the My Trades view even after WFM executes the corresponding trades.
Not all trades are approved. Under certain conditions (for example, when one agent is not qualified for the other agent's scheduled activities), WFM automatically declines a trade. If either agent's schedule is changed before a pending trade's approval, WFM automatically cancels the trade. If a pending trade has not been approved before the first day involved in the trade, it expires. In each of these cases, the trade does not occur
Requirements for a Successful Trade
For a trade to take place, all the following steps must occur.
- One agent creates a community or personal trade proposal.
- At least one agent responds to the community proposal or the receiving agent accepts the personal proposal.
- The proposing agent accepts a response from a community or personal proposal. (This step is only required for personal proposals if the proposing agent specified manual approval.)
- The trade receives either WFM's automatic approval or a supervisor's explicit approval.
