Free Excel holiday and leave tracker (also a leave tracker for Google Sheets)
Use our free Excel leave planner template to start tracking your team’s time off today. (It also works as a leave tracker template for Google Sheets.)
No matter how small your company is, you will need to track time off as soon as you hire your first handful of employees.
Our Excel holiday tracker (that you can download to use as an Excel file or a leave tracker Google Sheets ) is a good place to start — download it here for free and start using it straight away!
What you can do for free with our Excel holiday tracker
Our holiday tracker (can be used as a leave tracker for Google Sheets or Excel) is great if you want an off-the-shelf solution to manage time off at your small business.
It allows you to:
- Visualise a time-off calendar with your employees’ past and future leave
- Set a leave allowance for each of your team members
- Reuse the template each year and update the bank holidays
- Calculate how much holiday team members have already taken, and how much they have left
- Get all regular leave types such as public holidays, holidays, maternity, and sick leave.
- Set custom employee leave types and decide which ones are deductible from your leave allowance
How to use our Excel holiday tracker
We built our free leave tracker template to be very intuitive, but you may want to read these step-by-step guidelines to set it up correctly the first time you use it.
1- Download our template: once you click, the sheet will be automatically downloaded — once that’s done, rename it and save it.
2- Add your employees: head to the ‘Team members’ tab, and replace the sample data with:
- Your employees’ names
- Their department (Function)
- Whether their holiday allowance is set in days of leave or hours (Unit)
- Their holiday allowance
3- Add your leave types: now go to the ‘Lookups’ tab and add the types of leave you use at your company in the Leave Types column (for example, full-day, half-day, sick leave, long-term sick leave, parental leave, public holidays, etc.). Remember to select whether or not each type of leave is deductible from the allowance you previously set in the ‘Team members’ tab. You can also customise the identity code for each leave type.
4- You’re now ready to record your team’s time off: now, every time you approve a leave request, you can record it using the ‘Time off’ tab. Ignore the first two columns on the left (they self-populate). Simply pick the employee’s name from the drop down, add the leave start date, the amount of time they’ll be away and the type of leave they’re requesting.
5- Check remaining time off allowance: if you go back to the ‘Team members’ tab, you’ll see the numbers have adjusted, based on the data you added in the ‘Time off’ tab. Use this tab to see the number of days off your team has already taken, how many are booked for the future, and what’s left for the rest of the year.
6- Get a full overview with the time-off calendar: the ‘Calendar’ tab in the sheet is where you can visualise your team’s past and future time-off after it’s been recorded in the ‘Time off’ tab. This monthly calendar template is a view only tab, as all fields will be automatically populated from other tabs. What you can configure is the month and year field on the top left corner — use that to navigate to the period you want to have a look at.
You’re ready to go!
Limitations of the Excel holiday tracker / leave tracker Google Sheets
As brilliant as it can be, this tracker is still a spreadsheet! And using spreadsheets to manage employee time off comes with a few downsides:
- You’ll still have to fill the sheet manually with time-off dates and duration every time someone requests annual leave.
- Spreadsheets do break sometimes. If you’re not an Excel wizard, it’s easy to make mistakes — and once a formula is broken it can be hard to fix.
- People can’t book time off using the sheet. Every request still has to pass through you, via a holiday request form template and you might need to record your time off on Outlook, for example.
- You'll have to go back and forth between emails and spreadsheets, likely to lose information in the process, making the process prone to human error and miscommunication.
FAQ on how to use the Excel holiday tracker / leave tracker Google Sheets
How do I create my own holiday tracker in Excel?
If you own an Excel licence, it's pretty straightforward — open Excel and create a new file. You'll then be able to create a leave tracker template with your own requirements or take inspiration from ours. (It’s the same process for a leave tracker in Google Sheets, except you need a Google account instead of an Excel licence.)
What if I don't have Excel?
No need to worry! We've created a version of the Excel holiday tracker as a leave tracker template for Google Sheets. Sheets is Google’s equivalent of Excel and is completely free to use (you just need a Google account). You can download our leave tracker Google Sheets for free below.
Are Excel and Google my only options for a holiday/leave tracker?
An Excel holiday tracker or a leave tracker Google Sheets are both great, but they’re not the only options for your team’s leave. In fact, as a small business, we recommend you consider another solution for holiday tracking.
Tracking time off may seem easy, but it gets more complicated and time-consuming as your team and your business grows.
Updating a leave tracker for two or three team members is one thing, but it’s a different task altogether when employee numbers start increasing. Everything is multiplied — from the number of requests submitted to leave getting cancelled, and every update needs to be made manually.
Tracking the holidays of a growing team is much more arduous and errors are likely.
As a fellow small business, we saw this coming early on. So Charlie’s time off feature is designed to completely replace Google Sheets or Excel. The system automates everything to do with requesting, recording, calculating and tracking leave, so your time-off process effectively runs itself.
Thanks to a very intuitive platform, using Charlie is actually easier than Google Sheets or Excel – with no complicated set up and additional benefits:
- Allowing your team to ‘self-serve’ (they input all the data and you only need to accept or reject their requests)
- Calculating and updating leave allowance automatically.
Charlie does everything Excel or Google sheets does, but removes the manual processes and errors that come with either of them.
How do I add a new team member?
You can add a new team member to the Excel holiday tracker / leave tracker Google Sheets in three steps:
- Go to the "Team members" tab
- Type the name and details of the team member into the cell below the previous entry
- Your new team member has been added to the sheet and you can now record their leave and absences.
Can I automate the Excel holiday tracker more than it already is?
Unfortunately, any spreadsheet has its limitations, whether it's an Excel holiday tracker or a leave tracker Google Sheets. This is because a spreadsheet needs someone to manage all the leave processes in the background.
So although a holiday tracking spreadsheet is useful, it will still take up a lot of your time to juggle between holiday requests, emails, cancellations, amendments and updates.
If you want to completely automate the time-off process at your business, then a leave management system like Charlie is the way to go. Your employees handle their own holiday requests and make any tweaks and amendments themselves — your only job is to approve or reject in one click.
Why are some cells blocked?
You'll notice that some of the cells in the Excel holiday tracker / leave tracker Google Sheets
are blocked. This is to make it easier for you, as some cells don't need to change (you'll see a lock icon on these tabs).
What if a team member wants to cancel or amend their holiday?
With a Excel holiday tracker / leave tracker Google Sheets, you’ll need to make any leave cancellations or amendments manually in the spreadsheet:
- Go to the "Time off" tab
- Find the request the team member put in
- Once you find it, reset the allowance to 0 or change it to the number of days they wish to take
- You should then see that the allowance has been reset automatically in the "Team members" tab
Of course, this is not ideal, as the process is really error-prone. If manual leave updates are becoming a headache, you may want to consider an automated leave management system like Charlie.
