How to track annual leave for a small team

The first sign that leave needs a system is usually a simple question with a slow answer. Someone asks how many days they have left, and the answer involves an old spreadsheet, a search through email for the long weekend they took in March, and a guess about whether the Friday before Easter counted. It takes twenty minutes and nobody is quite sure of the result.

Tracking annual leave for a small team is mostly a matter of making a handful of decisions once, writing them down, and letting something else do the arithmetic. The tool matters less than the decisions.

When the leave year starts

Most teams run leave on the calendar year, January to December, because everyone remembers it. Others follow the financial year, April to March or July to June, so leave lines up with budgets and payroll. A few count from each person's start date, which is fair and also a lot more bookkeeping, since every person's year then ends on a different day. For a small team, one leave year for everybody is the simplest arrangement that works.

How much each kind of leave allows

Annual leave is the obvious one, but write down the others as well: sick leave, parental leave, compassionate leave, unpaid leave and anything else you offer. For each, decide the yearly allowance (or that there isn't one, as with unpaid leave), whether it needs approval, and whether it counts working days or calendar days. Annual leave nearly always counts working days, so a week off costs five. Maternity leave is often set in calendar days by law, so a booking costs every day it covers, weekends included.

The law sets a floor, and the floor differs by country. At the time of writing, the UK gives workers 5.6 weeks of paid holiday a year, which is 28 days for someone working five days a week, and employers may count bank holidays within it. Kenya's Employment Act gives at least 21 working days after twelve months of service. South Africa's Basic Conditions of Employment Act gives 21 consecutive days, which comes to 15 working days on a five-day week. The US sets no federal minimum at all. Check the rules where your people work and treat them as the minimum rather than the target.

What happens to unused days

There are three common answers: unused days are lost at the end of the year, they all carry over, or they carry over up to a cap, such as five days. A cap is the usual compromise. It stops anyone saving up a month of leave, and it doesn't punish someone whose busy autumn meant they never took their last week. Whatever you choose, say whether carried days expire, for example at the end of March, and tell people in October rather than in January.

How joiners are handled

Someone who joins in August hasn't worked the whole year, so they normally get a share of the allowance in proportion to the part of the year that is left. The sum is simple, and the only real decision is how to round it. How to work out pro-rata holiday for a new starter has worked examples, and the free pro-rata leave calculator does the sum for any leave year. Part-timers get a share too, in proportion to the days a week they work.

How half days and public holidays count

Let people book half days. A morning off for a school play shouldn't cost a whole day, and when half days aren't allowed people tend to take them anyway and leave them off the record. Public holidays shouldn't come out of the allowance unless your contracts say so, which means whatever counts a booking has to know the holidays for the place each person works. A team split between Nairobi and London is working to two different sets of holidays, and the working days calculator is a quick way to see how much a given stretch of dates costs in each.

Who approves

Every person should have one named approver, usually their manager, and a backup for the weeks the approver is away. Some leave shouldn't need approving at all, and sick leave is usually better recorded by the person than requested. A leave approval process nobody has to chase goes into the approval side in more detail.

Then decide where it lives

A spreadsheet holds all this for a team of four, and gets hard to trust after that. A shared calendar shows who is away but can't tell anyone their balance. A leave tool does the arithmetic, sends each request to the right person and keeps a calendar everyone can see. We looked at the main options for small teams, ToDoing included, in Leave tracking tools for small teams, compared.

In ToDoing, most of these decisions become settings. The leave year is one setting for the workspace. Each leave type is a card holding its own rules: the allowance, working or calendar days, whether unused days carry over and up to what cap, whether joiners are pro-rated from their start date, whether it needs approval, and whether people see a balance for it. A difference for one person, such as a part-time allowance or an extra day agreed when they were hired, is set on that person with a note, and the team table marks it so it doesn't get forgotten. When someone books, they see what the booking really costs, with holidays already skipped, the balance it leaves and who else is away on those days. Approvers get an email and decide in the app. Admins can export bookings, days per person and balances as CSV files for payroll.

Two limits are worth knowing before you start. ToDoing gives the year's allowance at the start of the leave year, pro-rated for joiners, rather than building it up month by month, and it counts leave in days and half days, never in hours. If either of those is a requirement for you, a dedicated leave or HR tool will fit better. If not, Put the team's leave where the work is planned explains why we put leave inside a work planner in the first place.