What are the best features on Leave Dates? We asked our team for their picks

Any tools introduced to your organisation should keep your team productive and free up your precious time. Not only is it essential to start your software's journey with best practices, but it's also necessary to maintain them over time.

Leave Dates is the best leave management system for businesses of all sizes, particularly SMEs, and it grows with companies at every stage. Both the desktop and mobile apps are feature-rich, customisable and affordable.

So, if you want to maximise every feature in Leave Dates, who better to ask than the team who created it? 

Let's look at some of the team's favourite features.

Setting up Leave Dates is easy

Our Quality Assurance Manager, Prashant, has a wealth of experience in Saas. Over a chat on Slack, he mentioned that the Leave Dates team is one of the few companies he has seen that began using their software before onboarding the first customers. He continued to say that setting up a company and team on Leave Dates is a simple, intuitive and enjoyable experience.

Of course, this is a process you only have to do once, but this feedback is reflected in an abundance of five-star reviews that Leave Dates receives from customers.

Visibility features

Transparency and visibility are at the core of the Leave Dates interface, and everything is designed to ensure that communication is clear at every stage, from requesting time off - to taking it. 

Employees can be given access to see everyone in the organisation, certain departments, or even just their own information. There are good reasons for giving staff visibility of each other's leave, but there may be good reasons for limiting access further. Both approaches are handled by Leave Dates. 

Assigning approvers is also very flexible, so company admins can choose between assigning approvers at the company, department or individual employee level.

Tip: If you have department heads, assign them as approvers for the department, rather than for individual staff. Later, if they leave the company, you only need to update the new approver in one place.

The almighty wall chart

The wall chart is the centrepiece of the Leave Dates interface and a favourite feature of our team and customers. Our Database Manager, Graham, says, "The wall chart is my favourite feature because it is easy to see at a glance who is on or off for the weeks ahead."

The Leave Dates company wall chart is divided into departments such as development, quality assurance, marketing or product. Everyone is displayed on the chart under their department heading. Arranging the team this way allows us to ensure nobody's time off clashes within each department, and everyone is easy to find.

Our fully remote team live all over the world, from our home in the UK, across the pond to Canada, down to Australia and right back up to Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Since we come from different cultures with much to celebrate throughout the year, so we have imported the public holidays for each country and region and linked them to each employee's profile. These holidays are displayed on our wall chart for everyone to view and plan around. 

It's also a great way to learn about each other's cultures.

Requesting leave anytime, anywhere

When businesses use a manual system for logging time off, staff are unlikely to receive a quick response to requests. 

After receiving the request, the manager needs to calculate the remaining balance, check for overlaps and manage communication across email, text or WhatsApp. This all adds up to far more time and energy than is needed. 

Of course, our team doesn't have any of these issues; our Product Manager, Niels, loves this about Leave Dates. He says:

"As a user, I really like being able to request leave whenever and wherever. Also, having the transparency to see holidays and my remaining allowance. I have never had that in any of my previous roles; I would have to ask someone to calculate my allowances manually."

Our recent software update offers more transparency on allowance balances than ever before. When applying for leave, the request form displays the total hours or days being deducted, along with a summary of the remaining balance. 

Seamless and handy integrations

One of the best things about Leave Dates is that you don't have to be logged in to use it effectively. Our integration offerings are favoured by Co-Founder, Liz, and Marketing Manager, Che.

Liz wears many hats at Leave Dates, accounts and HR being two of her main responsibilities. Her favourite feature is the Outlook calendar integration, as it streamlines her day, giving her the information she needs amongst everything else that is loaded into her schedule. The calendar integration is also available for Google and any other calendar software.

The Slack integration is Che's favourite feature because at 8 am each day, the Slack #leave channel reminds us of who is out of the office that day.

Our knowledge base guides you through each feature setup step-by-step. If you have any questions that are not covered in our resources, please submit a support request to our team in the UK and we would be happy to assist you.

See what Leave Dates can do to streamline your leave management. Create your free account today!