Managing holiday requests in a company by using Excel templates is a common practice in every HR department. In this article, we are going to discuss the various ways of handling annual leave and provide you with a free holiday management template. Hence, you can optimize your processes today and free of charge!
Summary
- How to manage employee holiday requests
- Time off management techniques for companies
- Creating an excel template step by step
- What about time in Lieu?
✅Download the free time off tracker template
How to Manage Employee Holiday Requests
Using templates as annual leave management tools is still the most common way to deal with holidays, sick leaves and other time off requests in SMEs. With a mid-high level of Excel or Google Sheets skills, it’s possible to create a useful template that can help you count how many days each employee will be out of the office. However, it’s not the most efficient tool.
If you already use Excel to manage holiday requests you will need to complement it with emails to communicate with the employees manually. One of the most time-consuming tasks for the person in charge of Human Resources is talking with each employee and recording their holiday requests into an excel file, and then having to check that there are no other people already on holiday during the same days. And finally having to calculate the total remaining days that this employee can take out.
So depending on your company’s size you will need tons of patience and it may be a good idea to check some tutorials to improve your excel skills.
Time off Manager Techniques for Businesses
For the team in charge of Human Resources holiday management, managing time off is one of the most time-consuming tasks of the year. Their ability to organise the entire company calendar will help workers enjoy their holidays and keep a normal workflow at the same time, without any decrease in productivity for the whole business.
As the human team grows, this task becomes more complicated and negotiations with each employee can affect an entire department. In addition to the Excel file, there are other free absence management systems that can help you simplify and automate this process, such as Factorial’s free holiday management software.
With the annual leave software, employees can request holidays through Factorial without the need to exchange cumbersome e-mail chains. The person in charge of Human Resources can easily accept or deny all these requests. You can see in real-time if there is any overlap with another employee’s holidays or sick leave. You can even access it directly from your browser without downloading any program or plugin. We are open 24 hours, 365 days a year!
Managing Time in Lieu with Holiday Requests Forms
With a simple PTO tracking spreadsheet or employee holiday accrual template you can get by. But what about when things become more complicated? Managing time in lieu isn’t the easiest. Essentially, lieu time is paid time off from work. Rather than an employee receiving pay for overtime hours, an employee would receive additional paid time off.
The challenge with managing time in lieu with a annual leave planner or employee holiday tracker sheet is that things can get very messy, fast. The complications of how to keep track of employee time off that are granted from lieu can be simplified using a digital holiday tracker. With this kind of tool you can easily add extra holidays for specific employees who’ve been working over time. With a digital tool, keeping track of how many days employees have used or have left is easy and intuitive.
If you’re unsure of whether or not you’re ready to invest into a new tool, you can also stick with a simple holiday tracker. This works well for start ups, while for SMEs, we would reccommend digitalising your processes. But for now, you can simply use the template below.
✅ Download our Free Holiday Requests Template!
Factorial’s Time-off Management Software
If excel is not your thing, you can use Factorial’s free time-off management software. Forget about formulas, e-mails and counting days. By using Factorial you can easily accept or deny each employee’s annual leave request. You can check how many days this employee has already requested or if the request overlaps with other employee absences. Automatically, no need to update calendars. You just have to decide and we will do everything else.
