The best sick leave app: 4 must-have features

David Klose -

A sick leave app helps you track staff sickness, gives you info on sick leave trends, and informs the right people if someone’s going to be off work. And because sick leave can affect payroll, the best sick leave apps will allow you to export sick leave data to finance and HR.

For this article, we’ve looked at what businesses need to manage sick leave effectively—and we’ve come up with 4 must-have features you need from a sick leave app.

  1. A sick leave app should accurately record your team’s sick leave. This includes which days someone’s out sick, as well as tracking individual and company-wide sick leave balances through the year. And this should also be automated—when someone takes time off, your records need to be updated automatically. No faffing around.

  2. A sick leave app should help you figure out payroll. There’s non-paid sick leave and paid sick leave. The best sick leave apps make it easy to tell your payroll department whether or not someone will be paid for the time off they’ve taken.

  3. A sick leave app should give your team an easy way to record their sick day. Plenty of businesses don’t have a good way for their team to put in a sick day. They’ll manage by using phone calls, text messages, or emails.

    While those messages are good for notifying a manager, they get messy and overlooked, creating calendar confusion and payroll discrepancies. You might think about using a special sick leave letter form, but that doesn’t do much to help. With an app, your team can submit their request from anywhere and attach any necessary documents—like a fit note / sick note from their doctor.

  4. Plus, the best sick leave app will help your team avoid burnout and work- stress-related absences. It alerts you to someone who’s overworking, so you can reach out and remind them to take their much-deserved holiday. This helps create a good work-life balance, a healthier company culture, and prevents people from feeling like the only way to take a break is to call out sick.

Below, we look at how Timetastic offers teams these 4 features in one easy-to-use app.

FYI: Timetastic doesn't just help manage and track sick leave requests—it’s an all-in-one time off management app that you can use to track any leave type, such as holiday leave, sabbaticals, parental leave, and more. Sign up for your free 30-day trial today.

Benefit #1: Automatically track and record your team’s sick leave (and get individual breakdowns for each employee)

Your team can register their sick leave notices through the Timetastic mobile app or web browser. So, once a sick leave notice gets sent, the time off automatically shows up on your team’s Wallchart.

Sick leave is automatically tracked separately from all the other leave types. On your Wallchart, you'll see the different types of leave are easy-to-spot with colour-coded descriptive icons. You can look at your team’s time off calendar and in a glance see who’s out sick—as well as who’s away on holiday or on compassionate leave, on a sabbatical, etc.

When you click on an employee’s name, you can see their full years calendar:

For example, you can see that David gets 15 days holiday allowance per year. He’s taken 12, so he has 3 remaining. Then you can see his “non-deductible” leave. This is leave that doesn’t count against his overall annual balance—such as his time off sick.

Here you can see that David took one sick day in May, and 3 days of compassionate leave—such as leave for a family bereavement—in February.

With Timetastic, you can also see a view of your entire team’s sick leave trends over the year:

In the image above, you can see that there is more sick leave taken from January to June.

These tools can help you spot any trends in your team’s sick leave, which could lead to making policy changes. For example, investigating why those months seem to generate more sickness. Is the workplace more demanding in these months? Are colds and viruses easily spreading in the office? Is there additional support or R&R time off required in these months?

Benefit #2: Use Timetastic to keep your payroll accurate

Most companies have a cap on the amount of paid sick leave that can be taken within a year. That means payroll needs to know when someone’s sick leave should be paid or unpaid.

To do this with Timetastic, you can either:

  • Give your payroll department access to Timetastic, where they can quickly scroll through departments on your Wallchart and check for any recorded sick leave within a pay period.

  • Export that data out of Timetastic and send it to your payroll department as a spreadsheet.

Without a sick leave app like Timetastic, your payroll department would have to go through clunky spreadsheets and add up each employee’s sick leave. Then they’d need to cross-check that with how much sick leave they’ve taken for that year.

But with Timetastic, all of that info is easily available and already calculated for you. If your company offers 2 weeks of sick leave, and your records show that David has only taken one day, then his next sick day qualifies for paid leave. It’s that simple.

Benefit #3: A recordable way to put in sick leave (and keep everyone informed)

Taking a sick day isn’t like submitting a holiday request. With a holiday, your team is usually looking at their work calendar, trying to find the best dates for a well-earned break.

A sick day is often last minute. People are not necessarily worried about whether or not someone can cover their workload when they’re dealing with a case of food poisoning. But you still want a way to alert your team when someone’s out sick, so everyone can prepare for the absence and shift priorities if needed.

This is where an app can make things really simple. With Timetastic, your employee puts in their sick notice through the mobile app or via their web browser.

They log into Timetastic, pick the date they’re taking off, mark it as a sick day, add any additional information (which is optional) then hit submit.

Plus, they can attach a photo of their sick note/fit note or medical certificate from their doctor (if needed). Now all relevant information is in one place.

Once the sick leave notice is sent, your company’s Wallchart is updated. Managers and admins can see that someone is out sick, and co-workers can see that they have the day off—but for privacy reasons they won’t see the reason why.

Plus, you can stay up-to-date with calendar integrations and daily absence summaries.

  • Calendar integrations let you take information out of Timetastic and put it in the work calendars you use every day, like Google Cal or iCal. So, when you start your day, you can look at your calendar and quickly see if anyone has put in a sick day overnight or in the early morning hours.

  • Daily absence summaries can get sent to you every morning. These summaries tell you of any time off your team has scheduled for the day. So let’s say a team member feels ill Monday night and puts in the Timetastic mobile app that they’ll be out sick on Tuesday. When you get your daily absence summary, you’ll see that they’re off sick.

Note: As we mentioned above, it’s common for businesses to still want their staff to contact their manager directly to let them know they’re taking a sick day. But by using Timetastic in addition to that method, you’re giving yourself a trackable process that keeps everyone in the loop and keeps your records up-to-date for you.

Timetastic’s time off app won’t stop anyone from catching a 24-hour bug, but it can help you reduce stress-related absences within your team.

When you use Timetastic, you get access to a company-wide Burnout Board:

Your Burnout Board tells you who on your team is overdue for a holiday. For example, in the image above, you can see that Verity Vaughn hasn’t taken a day off in the last 90 days and she has no holidays booked for the rest of the year. It would be a good idea to reach out to Verity and make sure she has what she needs to take a holiday (such as department coverage and support from management).

When your team takes their holiday time throughout the year, they’re going to be relaxed and happier at work. This can prevent team members from feeling like the only way they can take a breather is by using a sick day.

Next steps: Using Timetastic to handle all types of staff leave

With Timetastic, you can track and record your team’s sick leave effortlessly.

  • When someone on your team is sick, they just record their sick day in Timetastic.

  • Timetastic will update their individual leave balance (and give you a company-wide view of the trends).

  • Timetastic will update a shared company calendar so everyone can see that someone is off, so they can plan their day or week accordingly.

  • You can use Timetastic to make sure your payroll department is paying your staff for their time correctly.

But these helpful features aren’t limited to sick leave.

Our customers use Timetastic to handle all of their time off requests, from holiday leave to sick leave to parental leave and everything in between.

To see how Timetastic will work with your company, start your free 30-day trial today.


For more information related to time off management, check out our posts on: