Employees enjoy taking vacations to have the much-wanted rest and break away the monotony and stress of work. This is their privilege and as an employer, you need to keep track of their leaves so they can get the breaks they deserve. One of the best ways to keep track of leaves is through a leave template. Use this to track leaves in an organized way, calculate your employee’s attendance, and get an overview of the leaves of multiple employees.
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Leave Trackers
Different types of leave trackers
If you can keep your employees’ attendance records clear, updated, and accurate, you will have valuable attendance insight that can help you reorganize quickly when you fall short of staff members due to unexpected events. You also need these records for processing your company’s payroll and to comply with legislation too. There are many options for an employee leave tracker you can use:
- Paper templates
- Excel spreadsheets
- Online leave tracking software
You can choose any of these options depending on your needs and the needs of your company. Large companies that still depend on using paper or Excel spreadsheets to manage their employee leaves could consider switching to an online tracker.
Leave Templates
Why do you need this document?
Some managers think that tracking employee attendance is a lot like micro-managing. But this task is quite challenging as it involves a lot of work. You would have to keep track of planned leaves, overlapping leaves, and emergency sick day requests using a leave planner template. You also have to balance the demands that come with having to supervise all of the schedules of each employee. This is where you will notice the benefits of using a vacation tracker. These are:
Prevents errors in payments
If you don’t manage your employee attendance well, the most significant risk you might face is the possibility that one or more employees will receive an error in their salary. Even if you know you’re diligent in keeping track of employee leaves manually, having an effective leave tracker will give you the assurance that no one will ever get overpaid or underpaid.
Another benefit of this document is that it will help your employees keep track of their remaining vacation and sick days. This benefit will simplify the creation of employee leave reports that the HR Department can use to ensure that there are no errors in your employees’ pay checks.
Helps you avoid micro-managing
Having a template for employee leaves will make the managing of leaves a lot easier. This will save you plenty of time as it reduces the amount of interaction needed between employees and managers when making leave requests.
Your employees will have accountability in keeping track of their leaves
Sometimes, employees request some time off from their supervisor through a verbal agreement. Although you may allow this, it isn’t recommended. It’s better to require your employees to enter their requests into an employee vacation tracking sheet. This will ensure that the employee will have accountability for their leave requests. This will save time for both you and your employees while increasing your employees’ sense of responsibility, engagement, and accountability.
Promotes easier communication, especially for remote workers
In recent years, remote workforces have become more common in companies. These new virtual office experiences have many benefits, but they can also pose challenges for those who will keep track of employee schedules and attendance.
This is primarily due to the limited face-to-face interaction. Having a vacation tracker will ensure that this interaction can take place through programmed notifications. This means each team member will remain informed about any upcoming or current leaves.
Can boost employee attendance
This might come as a surprise to many, but another benefit that comes along with using this document is the increase in employee attendance. When employees know that their employer uses a reliable attendance sheet for tracking, it increases their confidence when requesting leaves. The immediate ease of requesting leaves and accessibility, no matter what reason, can lessen overall absenteeism and employee stress.
Makes attendance information more accessible
Transparency is a crucial factor in the feelings of engagement and trust of employees. When you have a good tracking system for leaves and vacation days, this provides them with a high level of transparency.
Rather than relying on either their HR department or manager to document their leaves accurately, the document can also provide them with easy access to their remaining leaves, the different types of leaves they can still request, and a history of all their leaves for the year.
Boosts the morale of your employees
Showing transparency and honesty to your employees could be an excellent morale booster for them. Scheduling days off won’t have to be a difficult process that will take days as they can accomplish this in just a couple of minutes by filling out the spreadsheet or template. With an efficient document in place, you will show your employees that you value their time, you know the importance of time-off, and that they deserve to take these leaves.
Helps you make better and more informed decisions
As an employer, one of the most significant benefits of having an employee vacation tracker comes from the features and functions of your document or software. For instance, if you use an online tracker, you can generate reports easily to provide concise and clear information about your employee’s vacation allotments and out-of-office activities.
If you can use these reports effectively, they will help you make more informed business decisions like highlighting issues on absenteeism, helping you identify leave-related trends, and helping you recognize the most common periods for taking vacations. When this information, some aspects of decision-making become more proactive and easier.
Employee Leave Trackers
How to create leave tracker in Excel?
The tracking of employee leaves isn’t as easy as it might sound. Aside from being a priority in your list of things to accomplish, it’s also vital to get this process right. This entails manually updating your calendar, revising the information on your spreadsheet, and making adjustments to your employees’ leave balances. Many companies still rely on tracking leave processes through documents like Excel spreadsheets to manage leave balances and time-off requests.
To make things easier, you can use downloadable Excel leave tracker templates. Such templates are ideal if you have a small business. But if your business starts growing and you gain more employees, you may consider using an easier method like an online tracker.
Remember that any minor issues or small mistakes will, later on, grow into bigger ones and at the worst possible times, like when you discover that some of your employees have the wrong leave balances at the end of the year.
Or you might discover that your employees have double-booked their holidays during a period that’s particularly busy like the holidays. A standard template for tracking leaves usually has different sections, which consist of different departments and space for all of the employees. Of course, if you download a template online, you can always revise it according to your needs.
You can even use different color coding to differentiate the types of leaves. This will make it easy and convenient for you to better differentiate and understand the various leaves. You can even automate your template using a dropdown menu.
Then you can choose the type of holiday the leave falls on, so it will automatically get added to your spreadsheet. In such a case, you can fill up the spreadsheet normally with the data. Then it will add up automatically in the totals as a summary. These automatic calculations will make your life a lot simpler.
Here are some tips for setting up your Excel spreadsheet:
Setup the spreadsheet
If you open a new spreadsheet, you will see that there are spaces to add different details on. You can create month tabs on the sheet with spaces for the number of teams and employees you have. In the space for the employees, enter the names of your employee, making sure that each tab has the names in the same position so that the “Year Total” tab will work correctly.
Assign different values
When creating your template, input as many types of leaves as needed while keeping everything simple. You can create different types of leaves like:
- Full vacation leave
- Morning vacation leave
- Afternoon vacation leave
- Full sickness leave
- Morning sickness leave
- Afternoon sickness leave
- Compassionate Leave
- Maternity leave
- Paternity leave
- Work from home
- Time off in lieu (TOIL)
Start filling in the boxes of your spreadsheet using the codes you have assigned. Then you can create a dropdown menu to reduce the risk of making errors as you input leaves. As you use the template, all of the leaves incurred by your employees will add up in the “Year Total” tab.
Leave Planner Templates
Using an online tracker
Allowing time-off for your employees will have a good Return of Investment (ROI) effect on your company. After their break, employees feel energized and they often have a better outlook when they come back. But for this to happen, they should plan their vacations in advance. To allow your employees to do this, you need to keep track of their leaves and balances. An online leave tracker is a type of tool or software that allows you to manage your employees’ time-offs and vacation leaves. You can also use this online tracker to:
- Manage your company’s leave policies
- Allow employees to freely request leaves
- Automate the approval for smooth workflow
- Keep track of who’s in the office and who’s on leave every day
Of course, you have to keep some considerations in mind when choosing your vacation tracker. Here is it what to follow:
Tracking leave requests
One of the main features of a vacation tracker to look out for is the ability to keep track of leave requests. Your employees should have the ability to manage their leaves and submit requests. As an employer, you should have the ability to look at the tracker so you can either reject or approve leave requests. This will save a lot of time while reducing human errors.
Team calendar
Having a team calendar is an excellent way to keep track of employees who are in the office or not at any point in time. This can also help your employees plan their work and manage any dependencies. You will also benefit from this calendar since you can easily figure out your team’s productivity and availability trends. These are important reasons why the vacation tracker you choose should have a calendar.
Multiple leave policies
Most companies have several shifts, geographical locations, departments, and more and their vacation policies will also differ. The online leave tracker you choose should have the capability to create different leave policies where you can map the employees under these policies.
Multiple workweeks and holiday calendars
Your local employees won’t have the same holiday calendars as your remote employees who live in other countries. the same applies to workdays. For instance, employees in the Middle East follow a Sunday to Thursday workweek while Europeans and Americans follow a Monday to Friday schedule. Your online tracker should have the capacity to accommodate different workweeks and holiday calendars, then map these to their respective leave policies.
Automated accruals
Manually calculating accruals isn’t an easy job. A good online tracker should have the capacity to handle varying accrual types, then calculate paid leave accruals automatically. This feature will save you lots of effort and time. The tracker should also have the capacity to define carryover rules, then automate the whole process.
Integrations
This is a crucial component for an online tracker. A good tracker should have the ability to integrate with all core employee database solutions, payroll solutions, and HR solutions. Compensation and leaves are closely related, which is why integration becomes crucial.
Reports and insights
High-quality online trackers usually come with reports on employee leaves already built into them. This feature will help you understand your employees better. For instance, there are times when you discover that your employees are not utilizing their vacation leaves fully. In such a case, you can encourage or incentivize your employees to take leaves, so they don’t get burned out. The tracker should also help you identify patterns in when your employees take leaves.
