How an annual leave tracker Excel template works (+ a better way)
You might be using Excel to track your team’s annual leave, and there are some acceptable Excel templates out there that will help you do that. But if you’ve ever tried using one, you’ve likely noticed that even the best ones aren’t really ideal.
In fact, using an annual leave tracker Excel template comes with a few drawbacks:
- Spreadsheet templates don’t handle the actual time off requests. You need to do this separately and then input the holidays into your spreadsheet.
- You have to continuously update the template as the year progresses, otherwise it gets messy and out-of-date.
- Templates are a pain to update when things change (for example, new team members, their holiday dates, when they change their plans, or when your time off policy changes).
Put simply: Spreadsheets don’t really cut it when it comes to annual leave tracking.
To give you a clearer picture, we’ll show you how to create and use an annual leave tracker in Excel with a real Microsoft Excel leave tracker we found online.
Then, we’ll introduce you to a much simpler way of tracking annual leave — Timetastic. As an all-in-one staff holiday and absence management system, Timetastic automatically tracks your team’s leave, keeps your company's time off calendar updated, and handles all new leave requests.
How to create an annual leave tracker in Excel (using a real template as an example)
We use the Microsoft Excel “Employee Absence Schedule” template for this example.
It’s a straightforward spreadsheet that doesn’t take long to set up. And it’s made by Microsoft themselves, so it should be good, right? In fact, it gives us a good example of the pros and cons of using an annual leave tracker Excel template.
Here’s how it looks after downloading the template and opening it in Excel:
So, it's pretty simple and easy to navigate. You get one tab for each month, your days of the month across the top, and employee names on the left-hand side.
You don’t put names in the first tab. If you try to do that, you’ll get an error alert.
Instead, you click on the specific tab for “Employee Names.”
Once you’ve input your employee names, you can go back to the main spreadsheet tab and use a drop-down feature to select employee names. You actually need to do this every month, which is annoying and repetitive.
After you have your employee names in there, you put in the year you want to track. That gives you all the right dates based on the calendar year.
You also get three different types of leave to choose from (Holiday, Personal, Sick). And you get two spots where you can type in custom reasons for absence.
For example, you can add sabbaticals, training time, work-from-home days, or any other leave type that you need.
Managing employee leave with Microsoft's Excel annual leave tracker
When it’s time to track someone’s leave, you need to take their requested time off and update the row with their name.
For example, below, we marked Sarah Jackson on holiday from January 3rd to January 7th. Then we marked her as out sick from January 10th to January 14th:
Then, on the right, the spreadsheet adds up how many total days she’s taken off for the entire year.
But there’s a big problem here — most people don’t count sick days and holiday days from the same leave balance. Normally, sick leave is deducted from a separate pool.
But with this spreadsheet, they’re grouped together.
That means you’ll have to go through and fix the data after inputting it in the first place — which kind of defeats the whole point of the template.
You’re tracking leave, but the info is wrong. So you’re creating double work for yourself.
There are other drawbacks to using an annual leave tracker Excel template, whether it's this one or any other you find online.
- With a template, you’re personally responsible for updating that spreadsheet: If you forget to update it or accidentally put the wrong dates in, your tracker is useless. An Excel annual leave tracker can help organise information into rows and columns, but it doesn’t do anything to help you spend less time worrying about tracking your team’s info.
- With a template, your team doesn’t have an easy way to request time off: In an Excel annual leave tracker, you can record when someone takes time off, but it won't manage their leave requests. This means your team will likely reach out to you via Slack, text, email, or in person to request time off. You’ll be left handling both the leave request and tracking processes separately as templates can't seamlessly synchronise them together.
- With a template, the more your team grows, the messier it gets: Your annual leave tracker Excel template will quickly get overwhelmed as your company grows. You’ll need to add or remove rows as your staff changes, and if you change your team’s allotted annual leave balance, you’ll need to re-do a lot of the template.
If these drawbacks aren’t a big deal for you, then you can probably get by with an Excel annual leave tracker. (And if you’re in that boat, check out our review of two Excel staff leave planners to help you make a decision.)
But if you’d rather avoid these issues, let me show you how Timetastic frees you from clunky spreadsheets and manual data entry.
How Timetastic is a step up from tracking leave in Excel templates
Timetastic is time off management software that’s used by a wide variety of small to midsize businesses — from agencies to salons to non-profits. Most of our users are business owners and managers who wanted a way out of inefficient spreadsheets and Excel templates.
So, how does Timetastic work? By putting everything you need from a leave tracker into one single app. You don’t need to juggle a template, employee emails, and a separate time off calendar. It’s all there in one place, and everything is updated in real-time.
With Timetastic, you can:
- Automatically track leave and always keep people’s leave balances up-to-date.
- Receive and respond to new time off requests from your team.
- Give your team access to a time off calendar that’s updated automatically when a request is approved.
- Plus more!
If you’re ready to try Timetastic right now, start your free one-month trial.
Track all time off requests and leave balances in one place
Unlike using an Excel annual leave tracker template, Timetastic automatically tracks your team’s leave. This is possible because your team books their time off requests directly in Timetastic.
When someone on your team wants to make a new leave request, they just mark the dates they want, select the reason they’re taking off, and submit their request.
When leave requests are approved, your company’s Wallchart is automatically updated.
You can see how simple it is in the video below:
After the leave request is submitted, you get a message asking you to approve or decline the request. You can get this message via email, Slack, or MS Teams.
You can hit approve or decline right from that message.
Plus, you’ll avoid calendar clashes and staff shortages
One of the big drawbacks of your team texting you their time off requests is that it can quickly get messy. For example, you may have forgotten that another team member already asked for time off, or that you already approved time off for someone else. This could cause you to accidentally approve too many people for the same day off.
But with Timetastic, you’re always alerted to any scheduling conflicts.
In the example above, both Lian Jie and Lily-May Conrad are asking for days off that overlap. This might be no big deal, or it could be a major issue you want to avoid by having one of them reschedule their time off.
Timetastic also tells you when someone requested their day off — as we think the fairest way of approving holidays is by honouring the “first come, first serve” principle.
Another plus: You can set maximum absent levels in Timetastic.
Maximum absent levels are how many people can take leave on any given day.
You can customise this across the entire company or by a specific department. Once the maximum absent threshold has been reached for a specific time period, Timetastic won’t let any other team members try to book a holiday for those dates.
With Timetastic, everyone is up-to-date about who’s away on leave
Annual leave tracker Excel templates are passive tools, meaning you have to open them up and check them manually. So if you’re trying to figure out if someone is off for the day, you need to open your Excel annual leave tracker and dig through the info.
Timetastic is more active than a template — it updates you.
With Timetastic, you can get absence summaries sent directly to you:
These absences summaries can get sent to your email, Slack, or MS teams account. They tell you who has the day off and who has time off coming up in the week. That way you’re always informed.
You can easily sync your Timetastic account with your work calendar:
You and your team can sync your Timetastic time off calendar to your everyday work calendar (Google Calendar, iCal, Outlook, etc.).
It’s as easy as adding a link to your work calendar. From there, you can easily see who’s off in your company or department by simply checking that.
See our integration set up guides for step-by-step instructions on integrating with other apps and services.
With Timetastic, it’s easy to add new team members and change time off policies
Finally, Timetastic makes it really easy to add or remove team members from your account and manage their annual leave balances.
Unlike an annual leave tracker Excel template, where you need to mess around deleting and adding rows and avoiding the conditional formatting (which gets messy as you make changes), with Timetastic, everyone on your team has their own profile.
When you add a new employee, you can upload a photo of them, add their work schedule, change their leave balances, and add lieu days.
Some of our users — like Curiousa & Curiousa — make sure that when their staff works overtime, they’ll get that time back in lieu. So if someone on their team puts in a 12-hour workday, they’ll get 4 hours off in lieu. That’s great, and easy to do, with Timetastic.
And because each employee has their own profile, you can drill down and look at their personal leave history — something you can’t easily do with an Excel template.
The next step? Say goodbye to messy annual leave tracker Excel templates
Any business, no matter how big or small, will see the benefits of using a time off management software, like Timetastic, to track their staff’s annual leave. It’s real-time, always synced, and helps you actually manage staff leave rather than simply record it.
There’s no need to download an Excel template when you have a better option that’s affordable, easy to use, and comes with a whole load of helpful features.
For more info on tracking leave, check out these articles: