How To Manage Multiple Locations in Excel
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As an HR manager, you’re probably responsible for a lot of things.
From keeping tabs on your team’s PTO to staying compliant with leave laws of different locations — there’s a lot on your agenda. When it comes to managing multiple locations in Microsoft Excel, it’s important that you respect the leave quotas and policies of each country your employees are located in.
Needless to say, this can often mean having to stay on top of everything manually. Sure, it’s important to keep tabs on leave policies of each country your employees are located in and respect the national holidays, quotas, etc — but, it shouldn’t be difficult, right?
Right.
However, there’s light at the end of the tunnel. Thanks to Excel’s functionality, multiple worksheets, and a few formulas, you can manage and track your employees’ leave quotas, and then easily fill in anyone else that may be needed. Keep reading to learn more!
Step 1: Outlining your leave policies and quotas in a summary sheet
Start by finding the leave policies and quotas for your company from your employee handbook or records. To keep track of this from your spreadsheet, we recommend creating a summary sheet (using a pivot table) on a separate tab on the same file.
If you have a lot of employees scattered across multiple locations, we recommend creating a separate worksheet for each location. You can track data by adding separate columns for employee names, leave policies, and leave quota — this will help you keep track of the unique requirements for each location.
You can create a summary worksheet to aggregate the data from each individual worksheet and easily compare the leave policies and quotas for each location. This will give you a clear overview of your company’s leave activity across all locations.
Doing so will also help ensure this data is readily accessible to you and your team right when it’s needed. You can use your leave policies as a starting point, then add the quotas for each location to their corresponding file. In this example, we’re focusing on employees located within the states of California and New York. You can modify this according to the number of locations or departments you track on each sheet.
Step 2: Tracking individual employee leave quotas
The next step is to create a Yearly Totals sheet to keep track of every employee’s leave activity and monitor their leave quota usage. In this sheet, you can track individual leave quotas and monitor them as you progress through the year.
It helps employees monitor their leave history and also simultaneously allows you to track their leave activity — all at just a quick glance. You can also separate each location and department within the sheet. As we mentioned previously, we’re using the sheet in this example to track PTO for offices based in California and New York.
Whenever an employee books a leave, you must make sure to update the monthly team leave calendar along with this sheet to ensure proper leave management on your end.
Furthermore, to keep your summary sheet up-to-date, you can use formulas and functions to automatically update the data from each individual worksheet. For example, you can use the SUMIF or SUMIFS function to sum the data for each location and update the summary sheet. You can keep your data accurate and up-to-date, no matter what changes are made to individual spreadsheets by using this method.
You can also consider using the VLOOKUP or INDEX-MATCH functions to quickly retrieve information from the individual sheets and display it in the summary worksheet. These functions allow you to search for specific data from one sheet in your spreadsheet and return it to another.
Step 3: Maintaining your spreadsheet
Here comes the hardest part!
To make sure your leave information is correctly managed, routinely updating and maintaining your leave tracking spreadsheet is crucial. You can use features like data validation to ensure that employees are only able to book leave within their allotted quota. You can do this by setting up a data validation rule that checks the total number of leave days taken by each employee against their annual leave quotas.
It’s important to regularly review and update the leave data in your Excel file to ensure that it is accurate and up-to-date. You should also consider setting up a regular schedule to update the data, such as once a week. You can also update the sheet whenever someone goes on leave. This will help you stay on top of any changes to the leave policies and quotas and ensure that you are making informed decisions based on the most current data.
Managing multiple locations with Vacation Tracker
Let’s compare how much easier managing multiple locations is on our tool, shall we?
If you have team members located in different places, you can create and configure multiple Locations in Vacation Tracker. Manage multiple locations in less than 3 steps — here’s how you can do it.
Begin by accessing the Locations option from the Settings tab on the Dashboard and clicking on Create a Location.
Place all team members in the corresponding Location, whether they are a part of the same team or not. Each Location has its own set of holidays, leave quotas and leave policies as well. Then, fill in all necessary details and hit Create Location.
You will be able to see general information containing user information, leave policies, and national holidays for each Location once you have completed these steps. Yes, it’s that simple.
You can customize these settings at any time. With Vacation Tracker, you can track and manage leaves using our employee leave calendar, get location-specific notifications and so much more. Get all your work done, without getting buried in Excel spreadsheets. What’s not to love about that? Just set up individual Locations (which takes less than a minute) and enjoy seamless automated leave tracking forever.
I hope these tips will help make tracking leaves in your organization even easier. If you have any additional questions about automating your workflow, please let us know at hello@vacationtracker.io — we’re always here to help!
Snigdha Gupta
An avid writer and aspiring marketer, Snigdha is a student at Concordia University’s John Molson School of Business.
