How To Track Your Team’s Vacations And Time Off

The features mentioned in this article have been upgraded, and the information presented may not be up to date. Please view our recent articles, and learn about the new version of Vacation Tracker.

Quick Reminder: The Holidays Are Fast Approaching

We do not want to create needless panic, but Thanksgiving is around the corner, and Christmas is less than a month away! Do you have a system in place to track your team’s vacations and time off for the holiday period? If you don’t, then listen up!

Maybe you’re a new Vacation Tracker user, or are thinking of downloading the Vacation Tracker app for Slack. In both cases, this article will serve as your guide to quickly and effectively keep track of your team’s vacations for the upcoming holiday season.

However, even if you already have a system in place that works for you, we still encourage you to read on. After all, Vacation Tracker may well be an improvement to your current system. Don’t knock it ‘til you try it, as they say.

In fact, you can try Vacation Tracker free for 7-days, without ever paying a dollar up front or putting in any credit card information.

It’s the Right Time to Start Using Vacation Tracker

Let’s get into it. We know that the days before Thanksgiving long weekend are generally a write-off. This short week can either fly by or drag on.

For some, a shorter workweek might mean that deliverables and deadlines are condensed. For others, it might mean that a lot of people are already on vacation, either literally, or they have simply tuned out.

As a team lead or manager, it might actually be the perfect time to implement Vacation Tracker.

For starters, employees definitely have holidays on their mind. They may already be counting down to the days to their upcoming vacations. It’s the perfect time to reconfirm these holidays and to enter them into the seamless Vacation Tracker app.

Second of all, you may have employees who will be working through the holidays. Wouldn’t it be useful to know who will be in the office and when?

Finally, with Vacation Tracker, creating leave requests will barely take any time out of your employee’s busy (or not so busy) day.

Therefore, don’t wait any longer. Start to track your team’s vacations and days off, today!

Track Your Team’s Vacations And Time Off Seamlessly

Vacation Tracker is a user-friendly, transparent and remote-team friendly tool to manage employee leaves.

We’re broken up the process of tracking your team’s vacations into five simple steps:

Step 1 – Download and Install Vacation Tracker

The Vacation Tracker application for Slack is great for teams who already communicate via this platform.

Through Slack, setting up your organization on Vacation Tracker is stress-free. The application takes all necessary information directly from Slack. Whenever an administrator makes a change to a team member’s profile in Slack, Vacation Tracker is automatically updated.

Once the app is installed, make sure that all of your team members are active users of Vacation Tracker.

Before you start to track your team’s vacations, inform your team that you have installed Vacation Tracker. This can be done during the sign up flow.

Step 2 – Set The Standard Holidays, Leave Types and Default Number of Days Off

To set your company’s holidays, log into the administrator dashboard and click on “Holidays”. Write the holiday name and choose the date for that holiday. You can also import a calendar of local standard pre-set holidays.

Furthermore, holidays can be set globally or separately for different teams.

Next, you can customize your organization’s leave types.

Administrators can easily configure the organization’s leave types through the “Settings” page. The default leave type is “Paid Time Off”. All other leave types ranging from Sick Day, Conference, Working Remotely, PTO, Paternity Leave, Jury Duty and more, can be configured by the administrators. And you can have up to 24 completely customizable leave types besides vacations and days off.

Finally, to add the default days off for your team, log into the administrator dashboard and click on “Settings”. In the “General” tab, you will be able to set the default number of vacation days for your team.

Of course, if it’s already the month of November, the remaining vacation days for each team member might be different. The remaining vacation days can be customized on each employee profile.

To do so, log into the administrator dashboard and click on “Team Members”. You will then see a list of your whole team. If you have a large team, you can search team members through the search bar at the top of the page.

To change the number of days off for an individual team member, click on “View profile” for the team member for whom you want to make the change. Once on their profile, you will be able to change the Total days off per year only for that user.

Step 3 – Receive and Approve Vacation Requests

You are now ready to start receiving and approving requests!

To track your team’s vacations and time off, team members will need to make requests for approval by the Approver or the Administrator. These two roles can be set up and changed at any time, by another Administrator.

To request time off, in any Slack channel or direct message, employees can type /vacation and press Enter. As Vacation Tracker responds, employees can select “Request a vacation” and choose the starting date of their vacation. Then, they can pick the number of business days they will be on vacation. Finally, they can confirm their leave request information.

Instantly, the request will be sent for approval to an Administrator or to an Approver. Once approved or denied, the employee will receive a notification in Slack.

Step 4 – Program Notifications for Your Team

Part of tracking your team’s vacations and time off is to keep your team informed about upcoming vacations and leaves.

Our Vacation Tracker bot will make sure you’re notified each time a holiday is coming up so you know who will be out of the office. Notifications can also be set up for different team separately. This way, everyone only gets the information that is relevant to him or her.

To program notifications, log into the administrator dashboard and click on “Settings”. Then click on the “Notifications” tab. From here, you can choose the default Slack channel in which notifications and reminders will be posted, as well as the time that you want those reminders to be sent by Vacation Tracker.

On your selected day, Vacation Tracker will send a reminder to the selected channel to let your team know who will be off the following week.

Typically, notifications help improve team communications about leaves and vacations during the holiday season.

Step 5 – Consult the Dashboard and More Options

The final stage to effectively track your team’s vacations and time off is to consult the Administrator Dashboard.

To access the administrator dashboard, click the following link or paste it into your browser: https://app.vacationtracker.io/signup. Please note that you need to be logged into Slack and that you need to be an administrator of your Slack organization in order to access the administrator dashboard for the first time. After you add other administrators for Vacation Tracker, they will also be able to access the dashboard even if they are not Slack administrators.

The Dashboard is a great place to track your team’s vacations and time off at a glance.

Vacation Tracker has even more options and functions.

Here are just some additional functions of Vacation Tracker:

1. Set Up Multiple Offices/Teams
2. Set Daily/Weekly Notifications
3. Export Reports from Vacation Tracker as a CSV file
4. Track Everything Through Awesome Dashboard for Administrators
5. Synchronize with Your Calendar
6. Set a Custom Start of the Fiscal Year

Kristina Ousmanova

Kristina recently left behind fast-paced life of Human Resource Business Consulting to freelance as a Content Writer. A regular Vacation Tracker contributor, she can be found working remotely from her home in Montreal, usually while eating a variety of snacks.