Vacation Calendar in SharePoint vs Vacation Tracker

Have you ever wondered what would happen if you were able to take a vacation like the guys from the “Office” did? During the last season, new manager Andy uses his annual leave suddenly to take one last trip with his family’s boat before he sells it and he’s out of the office for the better part of the season. When he comes back, he finds out not only he wasn’t missed in the office, but that business excelled in expectations and profit was rising. Do you think your office would survive your absence? What would happen if everyone took as many vacation days as they pleased? Would your office collapse? The answer is: it most certainly would.

Every organization, big or small, has to track vacation days for several reasons. Organization of the workload is one of them. Employers have to make sure that the work is evenly shared among the employees, enabling everyone to go on their long-deserved vacation. 

Tracking leave prevents burnout and keeps employees engaged and motivated. However, leave tracking is not the easiest task to do and it can turn into a real HR nightmare. That’s why a great number of companies use different software to manage vacation days. In this article, we’re going to compare two solutions for leave tracking your company could use and see how a vacation calendar looks in SharePoint compared to using Vacation Tracker software.

A vacation calendar in SharePoint is complicated to make

SharePoint is not meant to be a vacation tracking software. This means that if you want to track employee leave in it, you have to adjust it to fit this particular purpose. 

We won’t lie, setting up a vacation calendar in SharePoint is not the easiest thing to do and you’ll spend a significant amount of time figuring out how to do it. Numerous tutorials on the internet will only add to your confusion: add this, delete this, change that… There’s a moment when all gets too much to handle and you’ll start doubting the whole purpose of tracking your employee’s leave.

On the other hand, you don’t have to spend that much time setting up Vacation Tracker. All you need is to add it to your Slack account and employees are ready to submit their leave requests. Once they do it, you, as a manager will get a notification to approve or deny their request. It’s simple as that.

A vacation calendar in SharePoint will work only for basic leave policies

If setting up the vacation calendar in SharePoint was a drag with the standard leave policy, imagine how hard it would be to adjust it to fit the needs of some less conventional leave types.

That’s not a problem with Vacation Tracker because administrators can configure the organization’s leave type within seconds. All they need to do is to go to the “Settings” page where they can change the default leave type. After, they can choose among 9 different leave types. With Vacation Tracker you can easily track sick days, conference days, jury duty, paternity leave, and more, which is near to impossible when it comes to SharePoint.

Using SharePoint when you have more than one office/team vs using Vacation Tracker

If you have two offices in different locations or you want to give permission to each team manager to track its team leave, you’ll have to spend some time adjusting this option in SharePoint.  To achieve this you will probably have to add some custom extensions.

If you have to enable managers to only see their employee’s leave requests you would have to find a custom solution that will trim the views. Or you’ll need something to set permission on every submission at the time of submission. That can be tricky because you have to think about how you’re going to update it if some of the managers leave the organization.

That’s not a problem if you choose to use Vacation Tracker for tracking employees’ leave. Mainly because Vacation Tracker enables you to set up teams. Also, sending and approving requests for each individual team in Vacation Tracker is a snap. You can even set different administrators for each office to approve leave requests for each team. Also, Vacation Tracker enables you to set up holidays on a global level and for each team separately. On top of that, viewing individual team calendars also possible to get information about the specific team.

Using a vacation calendar in SharePoint costs a lot

When looking for the best way to track employee leave, you need to take several things into consideration. Time to set it up, how complicated the method is and its cost go into account. We’ve said that tracking employee leave in SharePoint is not the easiest solution. And SharePoint lacks some pretty important and useful features. That’s why it’s worth considering what’s the cost of SharePoint.

From the information we got from their website there are a lot of factors that go into an account to get the final cost of using SharePoint. Internal users have to use a CAL which costs around $100 per user. Also, each server requires a server license and the number of users may increase the cost of the server licensing. These are usually one-time licenses that cost around $7,000 per server. 

Using Vacation Tracker is a cost-effective solution for any team. The free plan lets you add unlimited users, so everyone can join and try it out, though with limited features. When you’re ready for more advanced functionality, the Core plan gives you additional features at just $2/month per user, and the Complete plan unlocks even more at $4/month per user. For very large teams with over 250 users, we offer special pricing. The best part? You don’t pay anything until you see if Vacation Tracker fits your business. Start with a free  free 7-day trial and decide afterward if you want to upgrade. With that in mind, would you stick with SharePoint or try Vacation Tracker?

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Ana Mladenovic

A cat enthusiast and a cupcake maniac, Ana is a freelance Content Writer passionate about HR, productivity, and team management topics. When she’s not at her keyboard, you can find Ana in the kitchen, trying to make delicious cookies.