Automate all your repetitive HR tasks and save yourself hours every week to focus on your most important work.
Start a free trialUse our free Excel leave planner template to start tracking your team’s time off today. (It also works as a leave tracker template for Google Sheets.)
No matter how small your company is, you will need to track time off as soon as you hire your first handful of employees.
Our Excel holiday tracker (that you can download to use as an Excel file or a leave tracker Google Sheets ) is a good place to start — download it here for free and start using it straight away!
Our holiday tracker (can be used as a leave tracker for Google Sheets or Excel) is great if you want an off-the-shelf solution to manage time off at your small business.
It allows you to:
We built our free leave tracker template to be very intuitive, but you may want to read these step-by-step guidelines to set it up correctly the first time you use it.
1- Download our template: once you click, the sheet will be automatically downloaded — once that’s done, rename it and save it.
2- Add your employees: head to the ‘Team members’ tab, and replace the sample data with:
3- Add your leave types: now go to the ‘Lookups’ tab and add the types of leave you use at your company in the Leave Types column (for example, full-day, half-day, sick leave, long-term sick leave, parental leave, public holidays, etc.). Remember to select whether or not each type of leave is deductible from the allowance you previously set in the ‘Team members’ tab. You can also customise the identity code for each leave type.
4- You’re now ready to record your team’s time off: now, every time you approve a leave request, you can record it using the ‘Time off’ tab. Ignore the first two columns on the left (they self-populate). Simply pick the employee’s name from the drop down, add the leave start date, the amount of time they’ll be away and the type of leave they’re requesting.
5- Check remaining time off allowance: if you go back to the ‘Team members’ tab, you’ll see the numbers have adjusted, based on the data you added in the ‘Time off’ tab. Use this tab to see the number of days off your team has already taken, how many are booked for the future, and what’s left for the rest of the year.
6- Get a full overview with the time-off calendar: the ‘Calendar’ tab in the sheet is where you can visualise your team’s past and future time-off after it’s been recorded in the ‘Time off’ tab. This monthly calendar template is a view only tab, as all fields will be automatically populated from other tabs. What you can configure is the month and year field on the top left corner — use that to navigate to the period you want to have a look at.
You’re ready to go!
As brilliant as it can be, this tracker is still a spreadsheet! And using spreadsheets to manage employee time off comes with a few downsides:
If you own an Excel licence, it's pretty straightforward — open Excel and create a new file. You'll then be able to create an Excel annual leave tracker template with your own requirements or take inspiration from ours. (It’s the same process for a leave tracker in Google Sheets, except you need a Google account instead of an Excel licence.)
Downloading the holiday leave tracker is easy: just click the link below and save the file to either a folder on your computer or in your Google Drive.
No need to worry! We've created a version of the Excel annual leave tracker as a Leave tracker Google Sheets template.
Sheets is Google’s equivalent of Excel and is completely free to use (you just need a Google account). Download our leave tracker Google Sheets for free below.
You'll notice that some of the cells in the Excel holiday leave tracker / leave tracker Google Sheets are blocked. This is to make it easier for you, as some cells don't need to change (you'll see a lock icon on these tabs).
With an Excel holiday leave tracker / leave tracker Google Sheets, you’ll need to make any leave cancellations or amendments manually in the spreadsheet:
Of course this is not ideal, as the process is really error-prone. If manual leave updates are becoming a headache, you may want to consider an automated leave management system like Charlie.
You can use the holiday leave tracker for multiple years, but you need to copy the template every time, and repopulate it for each new holiday year.
You customise the holiday leave tracker by manually adding the public holiday dates.
Note: public holiday dates like bank holidays change year-on-year, so you’ll need to check and amend these every new holiday year.
Yes you can customise the leave types on the holiday leave tracker — you just manually add or edit them in the “Lookups” tab. Be sure to follow the formula and resave the spreadsheet.
Your employees cannot request leave in the Google Sheets holiday tracker or the Excel annual leave tracker. Instead they must submit their requests for holiday and other types of leave via channels like email or a leave request form.
Unfortunately, not secure enough.
All information relating to your people needs to be securely stored and legally compliant, and spreadsheets — whether Google or Excel — do not comply with GDPR.
This is why so many small businesses choose to use software like Charlie for managing their leave. Charlie is fully GDPR-compliant and ISO 27001-certified (a recognised global security standard), and all data is stored safely and legally — giving you total peace of mind.
Where there are manual processes, there are mistakes. And the risk of error increases wherever a lot needs to be done manually — so it’s a pretty high risk with a spreadsheet.
As both the Google Sheets holiday tracker and the Excel annual leave tracker require you to do many things manually — manually taking leave request information from elsewhere and entering it into the spreadsheet, manually calculating the remaining allowance in the Time Off tab, manually saving the file, and then manually making any amendments or cancellations that come in — there is a fairly big chance of making an error. (Consider how often you’re interrupted from the task at hand by another, equally-important task…)
So if you use a spreadsheet for tracking and recording leave, it’s wise to have a backup copy. (Note: you’ll need to remember to resave the backup whenever anything on the original is updated or amended.)
If you use an annual leave tracker in Excel or Google, you will have to create your own process for avoiding and managing instances of clashing time off.
For this process, you could consider:
Leave management software like Charlie flags up leave clashes ahead of time so that you can deal with them quickly and painlessly. Plus, you can delegate requests so they go directly to the correct line manager — taking a job away from you.
It’s important to be careful wherever data is concerned and that includes shared holiday leave trackers.
Certain precautions will help to safeguard the data in an Excel annual leave tracker or Google Sheets annual leave tracker:
But as we’ve already mentioned above, Google and Excel spreadsheets do not comply with GDPR and cannot be guaranteed secure no matter how cautious you are.
For this reason, lots of small businesses use software like Charlie to safely store their data compliantly and without worry.
As useful as it is, our holiday leave tracker is still a spreadsheet! And using spreadsheets to manage time off comes with some downsides.
An Excel annual leave holiday tracker or a leave tracker Google Sheets are both great, but they’re not the only options for managing your team’s leave. In fact, we recommend you consider another solution.
You see, tracking time off with a spreadsheet initially seems easy, but it gets more complicated (and way more time-consuming) as your team and your business grows.
Updating a holiday leave tracker for two or three team members is one thing, but it’s a different task altogether as soon as you employ more people. Everything is multiplied — from the number of requests submitted to leave being amended and cancelled — and every change must be made manually.
It’s arduous and errors are likely.
But luckily there are other options. Options like:
As a fellow small business, we designed Charlie’s time off feature to completely replace holiday leave trackers in Google Sheets and Excel. Charlie automates everything to do with requesting, recording, calculating and tracking leave, so that your time-off process effectively runs itself.
Charlie is easier to use than Google Sheets or Excel, with no complicated set up. Plus:
Charlie does everything Excel or Google Sheets does, but removes all of the manual processes and errors that come with either of them.
If you’re already using a spreadsheet as your annual leave tracker, you might be worried it'll be a faff to move to something else. But you really don’t need to worry about that. Our main aim at Charlie is to save you time and hassle.
CharlieHR is an easy to use people platform for small businesses. So if you’re already using a spreadsheet, you can upload it directly to Charlie from a CSV file.
From there, you can:
Charlie is so easy to use that it doesn’t require any training. And it integrates with online calendars and payroll software like Xero, so you can be up and running in minutes.
Charlie also comes with built-in reporting, giving you useful data at your finger tips. And if you do need support, you can access it whenever you need via our help centre or customer success team.
Every business is different, so here are some questions to help you weigh up the pros and cons of sticking with a holiday leave tracker or moving to HR software like Charlie:
These questions will help you to better understand if you can deal with the admin that comes with a holiday leave tracker spreadsheet, or whether HR software will actually be more beneficial for you.
If you’re undecided about using a holiday tracker Excel or a leave tracker Google Sheets, have a read of our small business guide to managing time off. It’s free to download, and has all the info you need to fine-tune your decision.
