How Our Busines Automated Annual Leave Management Using Software

We’re a growing software company with 17 employees and aspirations to continue growing. As we’ve grown we’ve introduced new systems to automate our manual processes. I thought I’d share our experience of improving our leave management process in the hope that other growing businesses might find it useful.

Our Annual Leave Tracking Issues

The first issue was limited visibility, our annual leave records were paper-based and filed in a folder out of sight.

The second issue was duplication; in addition to filing leave on paper, employees would also add their leave to a physical wall-chart in the office.

The third issue was that our records were unreliable or missing people completely; remote working staff couldn’t fill in the wall-chart in the office so we couldn’t keep it current.

The fourth issue was poor presentation; it took some time to work out if there were holiday overlaps, it wasn’t immediately apparent when looking at the wall-chart.

The Penny Dropped

The realisation that we needed to move to an online system came when one of our new remote working employees emailed me to request annual leave and I thought I’m going to have to fill out their paperwork and put it on the wall-chart, there’s got be a better way of doing this.

The Solution — Leave Dates

Leave Dates is an online leave management system and the great thing is that it’s free to start using as it offers a free service for up to 5 users. Although we have 9 employees we were able to sign up to the service and add our first 5 users to set it up and try it out before upgrading to more users. Obviously, if you’ve got 5 employees or less it’s completely free.

Comparable Systems

In addition to it being free to get started, it also appeared to be one of, if not the cheapest system to use if you needed to add more than 5 users, which we did.

We did comparisons of other leave tracking systems and much broader HR systems but we came to the conclusion that the broader systems were overkill for our needs at this point in our journey.

After talking with Phil from Leave Dates personally, I was reassured that if we had any issues he’d be more than happy to help.

Setting up Leave Dates

Set up was simple and didn’t take long. There are some good introductory emails and videos explaining how to set the system up to match your requirements.

Leave Dates is flexible, it comes with many types of leave already set up so it lets you track any kind of leave such as sick leave, purchased leave, public holiday, jury service, unpaid leave, study leave, etc. In the unlikely event that you can’t find what you’re looking for you can set up new leave types.

Leave dates lets you set up allowances per employee and it automatically calculates what leave has been taken and what leave is remaining for each employee.

Using Leave Dates

Leave Dates has been adopted by all our employees, I’m guessing this is because they want to get their holidays booked in!

It has some great features that really help with usability, you can set up departments to filter employee availability by the department and set up managers as leave approvers.

Users can see everyone’s leave clearly on a full-screen wall-chart. There is a simple, quick, drag and drop feature that lets employees drag their leave over selected dates on the wall-chart. Administrators can also drag and drop or enter leave on behalf of employees to ensure it’s always up to date.

Employees can see their leave using an overview of their calendar for the year.

Administrators can see each employee’s leave and allowances using reports.

Conclusion

Leave Dates has solved all the issues mentioned at the beginning of this article and reduced the admin time involved in requesting leave.

If you’re a small business with similar issues, try it - it’s free to get started!

You can find it at www.leavedates.com