Best Practices for Managing Employee Time Off with Vacation Tracker

You’re ready to make leave management easier than ever, but unsure whether we can adapt to your unique needs?

We’ve built Vacation Tracker with issues commonly shared by HRs no matter the industry they work in. Lightweight and customizable tools can adapt to office workers, professionals on the go, and most importantly — people who handle their PTO.

But why take our word for it? Let us show you Vacation Tracker use cases for three completely different industries and clear away your doubts!

Why HRs working in IT love using Vacation Tracker

Below we have three use cases that most of today’s IT companies regularly face:

• Global remote workforce with different work legislation and timezones;
• The intricacies of the accrual system;
• Juggling work and PTO so it doesn’t impact the deadlines.

Companies with offices in multiple countries

Let’s say a company has an HR office in Belgrade, but the IT department is in Montreal.

While async work gets the job done for the most part, some real-time collaboration remains necessary. However, the coworkers can only work together for 2 hours per day, from 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM Belgrade Time / 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM Montreal Time. That time window may even be smaller considering each department has unrelated tasks to complete during those exact hours.

In addition to time zone discrepancies, there are local labor laws that propose different PTO rules for residents. 

Vacation Tracker can resolve these issues in multiple ways:

1. Eliminating the need for simultaneous work — Vacation Tracker provides a handy PTO platform for both sides. 
   Employees can access their profiles any time and check how many vacation days they have left, check the team’s availability, and request time off without waiting that 2-hour time window to bombard the HRs with questions.
   HRs and managers can approve or deny the requests quickly, with an explanation, or set up an automated sequence for pre-approved requests that only need to be formally approved. In case they’re restricted to the aforementioned 2-hour period, notifications will instantly let them know there’s a request pending, so they won’t miss it.

2. Creating and assigning locations — HRs in charge of Vacation Tracker can easily set up Locations from the Dashboard:

Using an accrual system

The companies that use the accrual system to calculate employee leave face several challenges:

• Calculating PTO for hourly workers;
• Having different policies for different departments, locations, and workers: bi-weekly, semi-monthly, monthly, and other accrual types mixed up;
• Implementing unlimited PTO policy;
• Doing math by hand. 💀

Fortunately, this can all be handled with Vacation Tracker.

You only need to choose the accrual type and fill in the leave policy form — the rest is automated and leaves no place for mistakes:

Leave management and IT project planning

If there are times when you need all hands on deck, you can set up a Blackout period and prevent PTO requests during busy periods — for example, during Black Friday, when online stores crash due to traffic explosions that need immediate fixes. Blackouts can be set for specific Labels, Locations, and Departments.

For times when vacations are allowed and approved, it’s convenient to know who’s available and who’s OOO.

With Vacation Tracker, you can schedule and send custom PTO reports. IT companies can use this internally, and to notify their clients about the availability of developers that work on their products — and get into great detail: 

How Vacation Tracker assists transportation companies from the passenger’s seat

Before global remote work became the hot new thing, transportation companies had dozens, even hundreds of drivers scattered across the world. 

One day in Turkey, the next in Austria, and next week, who knows?

Transportation companies have a unique set of challenges regarding work and PTO schedules:

• The driver fleets are often enormous, and there are a lot of workers to track simultaneously — for example, UPS is currently estimated to have about 330.000 active drivers behind the steering wheels.
• Drivers switch locations in a matter of hours, and dispatchers need to track their movements.
• Drivers have to take regular breaks; each country strictly mandates their rest by law, for their and other drivers’ safety and well-being. 

Vacation Tracker has tools that make work and rest tracking for a highly mobile workforce a breeze.

Managers can create multiple locations and assign drivers to special departments. All settings are fully customizable, and drivers can be labeled depending on when or where they drive, or what are their country’s holidays, leave laws, and policies.

Custom leave types and policies are tied to specific locations for maximum compliance.

Vacation Tracker is self-service and provides real-time visibility. Once the driver requests a break, their assigned shift manager or dispatcher receives a notification to approve it. They can go a step further and set up an automation sequence that approves the request scheduled in advance.

Hourly PTO tracking fits the specific needs of transportation policies and tired drivers. Automated PTO accrual takes note of each working hour, for complete transparency and fair payout and work breaks.

Finally, Wallchart helps with planning and scheduling by providing a clear view of everyone’s current location and availability:

Fashion moves fast: using Vacation Tracker for models’ work tracking

You probably wouldn’t think models and truck drivers have a lot in common, would you?

Think again — both do physically strenuous work and travel all the time, making them hard to track and their schedules complex.

Wallchart comes to the rescue again, with a view as large as you need it to be. You can see where each model is for their casting; select a specific model profile, and you can review their location, availability, and other data.

User profiles are as detailed as you make them and show all the user activity. You can track their past and recent activities, upcoming work, and location. 

As Slack is more common in the office setting, we’ve made Vacation Tracker integrated with email services as well. This way, notifications about the next gig can reach their inbox wherever they are.

Models can sync their calendars with Vacation Tracker to have a complete overview of their castings and shows well in advance.

We can deliver a sleek leave management solution to you, too.

No matter the industry, workload, or workforce — it’s time to ditch the paper and sheets in favor of something lightweight and intuitive that doesn’t feel like extra work.

Vacation Tracker adapts to any type of work setting to resolve the issues of HRs and managers worldwide. Customize the software according to your needs, and you can complete all the work in just a few clicks.

Sign up for a free trial and you’ll have a week to test every feature!

Anja Milovanovic

A journalist turned content writer – Anja uses her investigative skills to produce high-quality SaaS, Marketing, and HR content.