5 Benefits of Using An Annual Leave Management System
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Let’s face it — your HR team probably already has a lot on their plates. In addition to recruiting and onboarding new employees, maintaining employee records, making sure existing ones are satisfied, and managing payroll, your HR staff have plenty of work to do. So, why make manual leave management another item on their to-do list? When it comes to using an annual leave management system, the benefits of using one are obvious. And in this article, we’ll cover all the ones you need to know about.
Why you’ll love using an automated leave management system
Using an annual leave management system like Vacation Tracker will give you the biggest benefit of all — you’ll work smarter, not harder. After all, why should you waste your time, effort, and energy on manual leave tracking through spreadsheets when an annual leave management system could do it all for you at a fraction of the effort?
Here’s how it can make your life easier.
Real-time updates regarding leaves
Getting daily notifications about upcoming leaves is like reading a regular everyday newspaper. Except that this one is built exclusively for your company’s staff and is centered on time-off.
An annual leave management system like ours allows users to get notified of all scheduled leaves in their department or organization on a daily or weekly basis. Vacation Tracker notifications include details like:
- the names of employees who will be on leave
- for what reason
- and for how long.
Additionally, these notifications also include additional information like any incoming national holidays and can be customized to include multiple locations, departments, and users sorted by labels. Wanna know the best part? You don’t even have to leave your workspace to view these notifications. Depending on the platform you use, these notifications will get displayed on either your Slack or Microsoft Teams channel or will get sent to your inbox. Talk about convenience!
Bird’s eye view into everyone’s PTO schedules
How many times have you been greeted with the last-minute surprise of a teammate leaving right before an important deadline? Or has your PTO ever lapsed when you were unaware it even existed? It’s an experience that those who have gone through don’t want to repeat.
The beauty of using an annual leave management system comes from how it simplifies complicated leave data by computing it in a way that your employees can see their own and their co-workers’ leave schedules in real-time. Here at Vacation Tracker, we do so by giving our users access to an inclusive employee leave calendar that lets them see at a glance who’s going on leave when, for what reason, and for how long.
Not only does this save you the time and hassle of asking your colleagues around the office about their vacations, but it also helps teams plan and coordinate better, ultimately resulting in a win-win situation for everyone at work. What’s not to like about that?
Instant leave request and approval
Your phone vibrates. Another employee just requested leave. You take a sip of coffee, go through the leave request and decide to hit accept. You might not see it now, but this is the kind of instant gratification that comes from using an automated annual leave management system.
In recent years, tools such as Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace, and Slack have become go-to platforms for teams to communicate and collaborate every day — whether they’re working remotely or from the office.
And with Vacation Tracker, these very apps can also become the starting point for your next vacation. Using our tool, you can easily request (and approve!) leaves from the comfort of your workspace. All it takes is just a few taps on your computer to send a leave request, and you get notified immediately when your leave gets approved. Approvers can also approve or deny the leave request right when they get it.
Furthermore, there’s no need to send emails, submit paper forms or even sign into another platform just to go on leave. You will be able to see how many vacation days you have left at any time, and receive responses regarding your leaves within minutes. Our tool is fast, convenient, and simple — making booking time-off from work easier than ever before.
Automates just about everything
Imagine this: the year is 2022. Technology is everywhere. Just about every HR department out there has moved on from tracking leaves on those pesky Excel spreadsheets forever. Why? Because they know they deserve better than dealing with the unnecessary hassle and chaos involved in manual leave tracking.
Keeping track of leaves manually comes with a lot of risks. The risk of human error in inputting data, the risk of files getting misplaced or worse — them getting lost forever. With an annual leave management system in place, all your leave data (and we mean all of it) gets stored on a secure cloud platform, giving you access to it as soon as you need it. From individual leave history to company-wide leave reports, a tool like ours makes it easy to automate, track and manage all your leave information.
So instead of lost vacation requests, constant paperwork, endless emails, and disgruntled, burnt-out employees, you get a team that’s up to date on exactly how much PTO they’ve used, have left, and have accrued.
Completely customizable to your needs
It’s safe to say that there is no one size fits all solution when it comes to leave management.
After all, every company is built differently. A business either could have 9 employees, 9 departments, or offices in 9 locations. For some companies, 9 employees mean one office with a single department. For others, that means 9 employees in 9 different locations or offices.
The point is, employee management is a unique experience for every HR department. And here at Vacation Tracker, we get that. That’s why we allow our users to fit our tool into the way they work, and not vice-versa. All the flexibility you need to customize and tailor our tool is at your fingertips. From configurable leave policies, creating multiple departments and locations to even setting up individual employee leave quotas and PTO accrual, there isn’t a thing you can’t do with our tool.
Still not convinced? Witness the magic of easy leave tracking for yourself by signing up for our free 7-day trial. You won’t believe what you’ve been missing out on!
Snigdha Gupta
An avid writer and aspiring marketer, Snigdha is a student at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business.
