An employee holiday tracker is one row per person and four numbers against it: the entitlement, what has accrued so far, what has been taken or approved, and what is left. Almost every small employer has one already, as a holiday spreadsheet somebody built years ago. What sends them looking for a better one is rarely the arithmetic. It is that one person maintains it, nobody else can see a balance without asking, and a request approved by text is entered late or not at all. This page sets out what the tracker has to carry, the holiday spreadsheet template columns that are usually missing, and where a sheet stops being enough.
The columns a holiday sheet template needs
Name, days a week, weeks of leave, entitlement worked out from those two, leave year start, days accrued as of today, days taken, days approved but not yet taken, and days left. The two columns most spreadsheets lack are the last two: approved-but-not-taken, and the date the balance is calculated as of. Without the first, a person with ten days left and five booked for August is allowed to book five more. Without the second, two people reading the sheet in the same week get different answers.
The team holiday tracker as a holiday chart: a column per person, a row per week
The team holiday tracker most small employers keep is the wall chart: people across the top, weeks down the side, a coloured cell for each day off. It answers the question the balance cannot, which is who is off when, and it is the only view that stops two people from the same three-person team being away in the same week. Keep the chart and the balance in the same file, or the two drift; the paid wall chart on this site is the two views on one record, with the balance updating as a request is approved.
A simple annual leave spreadsheet, and where it stops
For five people on the same five-day week a sheet is enough, and the free calculators on this site do the entitlement and accrual arithmetic it starts from. It stops at the point where the request itself has to live somewhere: when an employee wants to see their own balance without asking, when someone other than the sheet's owner has to approve, and when the balance has to move because the approval happened. That is a record with permissions rather than a sheet.
Keep it from year to year
The year end is where a holiday tracker template earns or loses its keep: carry-over applied by the policy's rule, the entitlement reset without losing last year's requests, and a leaver's untaken balance shown at the leaving date rather than reconstructed from memory. Copying the sheet to a new tab each April and retyping the entitlements is how a part-timer's 16.8 days becomes 28 in year three, and it is the single most common way a tracker goes wrong.
Questions people ask about employee holiday tracker
What should an employee holiday tracker include?
Each person's pattern and entitlement, the leave year dates, every request with dates, days and status, days accrued as of today, days approved but not yet taken, and the balance. The wall chart view alongside the balance view.
Is there a free holiday tracker template?
The annual leave calculator and the holiday leave calculator on this site are free and need no account; they work out the entitlement, the accrual and the balance a tracker starts from. The tracker itself, every employee and request on one wall chart, is the paid plan.
Should the tracker be kept in days or hours?
Days where everyone works the same length of day; hours where part-timers' days vary or anyone works a compressed week, because 5.6 weeks of a 20-hour week is 112 hours and a days figure hides it.
Why do balances in a holiday spreadsheet template go wrong?
Entitlements typed rather than worked out, approved requests never entered, and no column for approved-but-not-taken leave. Each is a small omission that turns into a dispute in March.