How to Build a Vacation Accrual Spreadsheet in Excel

by claudia
7 minutes
February 20, 2021

Last updated on February 20, 2021

How to Build a Vacation Accrual Spreadsheet in Excel

As your company grows, so does your team. And with a bigger workforce comes with bigger responsibilities. While vacation accrual management might’ve once felt like a manageable task, it might now start to get out of hand.

While accruals may seem like a straightforward concept, the calculations can quickly become complex and time-consuming. If you’re tracking this on Excel, when not properly set up, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of formulas. Even worse, sometimes the smallest mistake can have a ripple effect on all of your employees’ vacation balances.

So, if you find yourself in this situation, don’t worry because we’re here to lend a helping hand. Our guide will show you how to master calculating vacation accruals using spreadsheets.

What are Vacation Accruals?

Before we hop into Excel, let’s start with the basics: understanding accruals.

Vacation Accruals refers to a system where paid time off is earned gradually over time. This means that employees don’t earn all their vacation days at once, they accrue time off throughout the year, depending on their tenure, role, or hours worked.

Despite the challenges, vacation accruals are important for businesses. They help protect organizations from employees who take time off they haven’t earned yet. Imagine an employee takes their two weeks of vacation in January and quits in February. That’s coming out of your pocket, ouch. Accruals help prevent those types of situations.

Vacation accruals can also be a great incentive to attract and retain top talent. For example, offering faster accrual rates for senior employees might motivate employees to grow within the company, reducing turnover costs and improving morale. What’s not to love about that?

Creating a Vacation Accrual Policy

Before we even open Excel, you’ll need to make sure your vacation accrual policy is clearly defined. This means deciding how often employees will earn PTO and how much PTO they will accrue. Will they accrue vacation time daily, weekly, or monthly? How much will they earn based on their position or years of service?

There are several options for how vacation time can accrue, so choose the one that best fits your company’s needs. Here are some examples:

Hourly accrual: Employees accrue a set amount of PTO for every hour worked.

Daily accrual: Employees accrue PTO every day they work.

Weekly/monthly accrual: Employees accrue a certain amount of PTO every week or month.

Once you’ve chosen an accrual rate, it’s essential to communicate this clearly to your employees and ensure that it’s applied consistently across the organization. The clearer the rules, the easier it will be to manage PTO and avoid any misunderstandings down the road.

How to Set Up a Vacation Accrual Spreadsheet

Creating a vacation accrual calculator in Excel may seem daunting at first, but it’s actually quite simple once you break it down into steps.

Our free Excel leave tracking spreadsheet is a great starting point but we also have resources to help you set up your own. Once you’re set up with the basics, we’ll teach you how to add accruals to your leave tracker.

Create A Vacation Accrual Calculator in Excel

Once your policy is set, it’s time to create the actual vacation accrual spreadsheet in Excel. Insert a new sheet on the file and name it “Accruals” (or something similar, as long as it makes sense to you!). Then, start by adding all data relevant to your vacation accruals tracking.

Here’s a simple list of columns you’ll want to include in your template:

Employee Name: The name of the employee

Department or Location: The department the employee works in (optional, but useful if you have multiple teams or locations)

Start Date: The date the employee started at the company

PTO Quota: The total number of PTO days (or hours) the employee is entitled to per year

Accrual Rate: How much PTO the employee earns per period (daily, weekly, etc.)

This template will serve as the foundation for all the calculations you’ll need to make to track vacation accruals effectively.

How To Track PTO Accruals In Excel

Calculate the Vacation Accruals

Now it’s time for some number-crunching! Let’s start calculating each employee’s accrual based on their leave quota and accrual frequency.

The general formula is as follows:

PTO accrued per week = Quota ÷ (Number of workdays in a week × Number of hours in a workday)

Let’s start calculating this for Cara, who is located in Belgrade and accrues PTO weekly. Substituting all values, we get:

PTO accrued per week = 18 days ÷ (5 days/week × 8 hours/day)

PTO accrued per week = 0.45 hours/week

So, if your employee’s vacation day quota is 18 days per year, they would accrue approximately 0.45 hours of PTO per week. This means they’ll earn about 0.56 days of PTO per week (assuming that 1 day off equals 8 hours of PTO). It’s worth noting that the above calculation is an approximation. Actual accrual rates may depend on your company’s policies and practices, including rounding rules and any limitations or restrictions on the use of PTO.

Now, let’s do the same for Monica who is located in Phoenix and accrues PTO monthly. Substituting all values, we get:

PTO accrued per month = Quota ÷ 12 months = 2.1 hours/month

Therefore, with a quota of 21 days, she would accrue approximately 2.1 hours of vacation time per month. Easy, right? Now do the same for each employee in your company. Depending on the numbers, you may round up or down the accruals to the nearest hour or fraction of a day, or you can use different formulas to calculate PTO accruals.

This will be your reference page for any questions you or your employees may have about Accruals.

Add Vacation Accruals to Each Month

To keep easier track of vacation accruals on a day-to-day basis, create a dedicated column for it on each Monthly sheet. You can add any data you think is relevant to Accruals here. We added columns for Total PTO accrued, PTO taken, and PTO remaining.

Then, calculate the total vacation accrued so far for each employee. Since we are in February, each employee has a relatively low accrual at this point.

Let’s say Tony wants to take a day off on February 14. When logging his day off request on the Monthly sheet, calculate the total PTO he has accrued by then and fill in the other columns. Easy as 1, 2, 3.

How To Track PTO Accruals In Excel

Tips for Maintaining an Effective Vacation Accrual Spreadsheet

Now that your vacation accrual spreadsheet is set up, maintaining it is just as important. Here are a few tips to ensure your spreadsheet stays organized:

Regularly Update the File

Be sure to update your spreadsheet every time an employee takes time off or when new hires join the company. If you don’t keep your file up-to-date, odds are you’ll lose control of the file and your accruals will be full of errors. No thank you!

If an employee takes vacation time, make sure to subtract the hours or days from their balance, and if they’ve accrued more vacatio, add it to the spreadsheet. Regular updates will save you time in the long run and prevent you from losing track of accruals.

Backup Your Data

We all know the horror of losing valuable data. That’s why it’s essential to back up your vacation accrual spreadsheet regularly. Using cloud-based services like Google Sheets, OneDrive, or Dropbox helps secure your data and makes it accessible from anywhere. Plus, these tools give you access to version history, so you can always revert to a previous version if something goes seriously wrong.

Limitations of Using Excel for Vacation Accrual Tracking

While Excel is a powerful tool for data analysis, it is limited when it comes to tracking vacation accruals.

Here are some things to keep in mind as your company grows:

Manual Calculation: Even with formulas, manual calculations can still lead to mistakes. The more employees you have, the more prone you are to errors, and a small mistake can cause a big problem.

Lack of Automation: Excel won’t automatically update PTO balances or send reminders when an employee is about to use all their PTO. It’s all up to you to handle this.

Collaboration Issues: Excel doesn’t make it easy for people to collaborate. When multiple people are editing a file, it’s hard to ensure that everything remains accurate and consistent.

Automate PTO Accruals with Vacation Tracker

We don’t know about you but even reading about managing PTO Accruals sounds tiring.

If only there was a way to automate this all…

Enter Vacation Tracker.

Our tool automates PTO accrual calculations and effortlessly tracks all your employees’ time off. It’s like having an assistant who handles all the number crunching and data entry for you.

With Vacation Tracker, you won’t have to worry about mistakes, manual updates, or complicated formulas. Just set it and forget it. It’s a simple, streamlined way to manage PTO and keep your HR department running smoothly.

Our Accruals feature completely eliminates the need to calculate employee leave balances manually. So if you’re looking for an easy way to keep track of PTO Accruals for your business, we have you covered.

Wondering how? Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to do it.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg! Our vacation management tool offers a bunch of other awesome features that can help you achieve so much more. So why not give it a try and see for yourself? Your HR department (and your employees!) will thank you.

Ready to make the switch?

Try Vacation Tracker today and take the headache out of PTO tracking.