How to track staff holidays without spreadsheets (and why you should)

Quick takeaways

• Spreadsheets are a trap, and manual tracking can only work for tiny teams; spreadsheets quickly mutate into error-prone headaches that drain hours of management time.
   
• Automation in modern leave software restores your sanity, taking care of complex pro rata maths and giving real-time visibility to all.
   
• Leave Dates offers the perfect balance of powerful features, simplicity and affordability for SMEs.

Why spreadsheets fail growing teams (and what works better)

If tracking your staff holidays without spreadsheets has ever popped into mind, you’re not alone. Many growing businesses quickly reach the point where spreadsheets just don’t get the job done. 

We are living through something of an ‘analogue revival’ at the moment, with hashtag ‘slow life’ popping up everywhere and sales of vinyl, craft supplies and even DVDs hitting levels not seen since last century. But there’s a time and a place for nostalgia, and if you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to use a fax machine, you’ll know it’s not the workplace. There’s a big difference between a mindful hobby and admin hell.

One place we must resist the pull of yesteryear is in HR. While you might enjoy cracking out an old school Filofax to organise your personal life, try and use it to book non-overlapping holidays for a team of twenty, and you’ll be chucking it at the wall with your papercut fingers before a week is out. You won’t do much better with its clunky noughties cousin – the spreadsheet – either. Trying to get Excel to reliably track leave allowances (why does it think everything is a date?!) is harder than trying to chat to your mates on MSN Messenger over dial-up internet while Auntie Jean keeps ringing the landline. The nostalgic sheen quickly wears off.

In the early days of a business, it feels like anything is possible. Remember all of your team’s birthdays? Easily. How they take their coffee? No probs. Holiday dates? As if you’d forget! For those days when you don’t want to engage your brain, a simple Excel page is all you need – it’s free, it’s familiar and it’s just sat right there on your desktop. Plus, a spreadsheet just screams ‘organisation’, right?

Spreadsheets don’t scale, and they’re very prone to human error

But then something wonderful happens. You grow. It’s amazing – but also scary. Suddenly, your team of five is a team of fifteen. Then forty. Never mind birthdays, remembering everyone’s names is as much as you can manage. And that simple spreadsheet? It’s got 32 tabs. It’s mutated. It’s got formulas only Jo from Accounting understands (and she’s off trekking in Nepal, it says so… somewhere?), and a file name like ‘Staff_Leave_FINALFINALFINAL_ACTUALLYFINALTHISTIME_V8_DO_NOT_DELETE_V4.xlsx

If you’ve spent one too many Tuesday mornings trying to figure out if your Team Leader is actually in the office, WFH or just forgot to colour their cell green, it might be time to accept that the spreadsheet struggle is holding you back. It may not have a vintage aesthetic, but there’s a much, much better way to manage your team and your time off.

Spreadsheets are “dumb” documents for managing staff leave. They don’t know that company policy allows carry-over days. They don’t know that two people in a three-person team can’t be off at once. They definitely can’t tell you that Raj hasn’t taken a day off in six months and is rapidly approaching burnout territory.

Use dedicated leave management software

Tracking staff leave is the one thing that dedicated leave management software was designed to do extremely well. Unlike spreadsheets, or shared calendars used with text and email chains, they are programmed to understand leave patterns, company policies, bank holidays and how individual entitlements and balances are calculated.

Centralise communication, requests, balances and approvals

Using spreadsheets or another manual system for leave management can result in missed email requests, calendar invites not syncing, and a nightmare of version control.

Using leave management software, employees can see their own balances, request time off and know whether it has been approved right from their mobile app or on desktop. Managers no longer have to cross-check emails, texts or shared calendar entries to answer a simple question, the software will inform them of a clash, and be visible via the shared wall chart.

Automate rules, accruals and compliance 

Great leave management software will handle all of the complex stuff automatically, whether it be pro-rata entitlements, carry-over, limits, bank holidays across multinational teams and more. They will also give you the ability to create your own leave types, integrate with your favourite business tools and remove the need for manual calculations.

We live in an era of agile working, remote teams and flexible hours. A static spreadsheet may as well be a filing cabinet. It can’t keep up, and will fail your modern team. The solution is leave management software.

The shift away from spreadsheets gives managers and their staff a single, accurate source of time off data.

Going from Excel to leave management software, like Leave Dates, is like switching from a horse and cart to a top of the range electric car – it’s not just faster, it changes the way you move. You gain:

• Real-time clarity – a digital wall chart means you know where everyone is at any time. It’s fair, transparent and avoids any nasty surprises or last-minute panics.
• Automation – all your accruals, pro rata calculations and carry-over rules are applied automatically and totals are updated. No more emails asking how much leave someone has left – they can see their balance at a glance.
• Integration – the best software talks to the tools you’re already using, so leave approvals mean calendars (Outlook, iCal, Google etc) are updated with no effort. Nothing gets lost in the digital mud.

Why Leave Dates is ideal for small businesses

At this point, you’re likely nodding along saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ with tears of joy and relief in your eyes. And it gets better – you don’t need to find, set up and train your team on a bloated HR system that takes 6 months to learn.

Leave Dates was built with SMEs in mind, focusing on being the absolute best at one thing: managing time. A simple, intuitive interface means your team won’t need a manual. If they can use a smartphone, they can use Leave Dates. Requesting or approving leave is a three-second task, max. It was made for small teams that are ready to be big ones – whether you’ve got five employees or fifty, Leave Dates scales with you and transparent pricing reflects this. No ‘call for a quote’ nonsense – you pay for what you use. Leave management needn’t be a luxury.

Other features that save you tons of time include a multi-person leave request feature, for those festive shutdowns, and custom leave types for the forward-thinking startups dreaming up all manner of leave-related perks. There’s also 24/7 access to genuine support, and a huge knowledge base sharing top tips and best practices.

Finally, the barrier to entry is basically non-existent. There’s no ‘big migration’. No weeks of data entry and duplicate systems. Just import your existing leave data into Leave Dates, set up your users and roles (this takes minutes, not days), customise to your needs and off you go. Users get an email, they’ll simply log in and wonder why you didn’t do this years ago.

Real-world impact

What does the analogue-to-digital switch look like in real terms? It looks like a line manager regaining five hours a month that they can spend on strategy, innovation, hiring or even, heaven forbid, a lunch break! It looks like no more email tennis – “Can I?” “Let me check” “Wait, Steve is off then” “How about the week after?” – because the whole company is empowered by having leave info at their fingertips. You can even check your holiday balance from your phone in front of the TV on Sunday evening, if you’re so inclined, and have your flights booked before the office opens on Monday.

Clarity and transparency build trust. No office politics, no dramas. Rules are baked into the software, and software doesn’t have favourites. Where you have trust, you have a team that can focus on the job at hand.

Final thoughts 

Outgrowing your systems isn’t a failure, it’s a sign of success and rapid growth. It means you’re too big to be contained in a spreadsheet and you’re moving too fast for manual updates. The best companies give their employees the tools they need to succeed – clarity and efficiency are the greatest gifts you can give a busy team member.

Save the ‘slow life’ for your actual holiday, don’t let it bog down the process of getting there. Instead of squinting at a paper wall calendar or a static grid of nonsensical cells, trying to work out if a smudge of ink or typo means your lead developer is in the office or the other side of the Med, buck the 90s trend and go digital. Now is the time to move your leave tracking to the cloud – just think of all that extra time you’ll have to feed your sourdough starter and build your CD collection back up!