What is a Vacation Tracker?


According to a study by Harvard Business Review, 94% of vacations and time-offs have a good ROI in terms of energy and outlook upon returning to work, provided the vacations are planned well in advance. In order to allow your employees to plan their vacations beforehand, you need to keep track of their leaves and vacation balances.

 

Vacation Tracker is a software or a tool that allows you to do just that - keep track of your employees’ vacations and time-offs. The tool also helps in managing the organization’s time-off policies, allows employees to request time-offs, automates approval workflows, and keeps track of who’s in and out of the office at any given time.

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Why is a Vacation Tracker important?

Vacation Planning

With a vacation tracker in place, every employee and their respective managers have clear visibility into the number of available and consumed vacation days ensuring better vacation planning.

Transparency

Vacation tracker software allows employees to access the holiday calendars of their teammates. This enables employees to plan their leaves accordingly and results in greater transparency within the team.

Absenteeism trends

Get a better understanding of leave patterns across the organization. With a vacation tracker, you have a chance to rectify specific issues your employees may be experiencing.

Essential features to look for in a Vacation Tracker

1. Leave requests and tracking

Leave requests are one of the essential features of any vacation tracker. Employees should be able to manage their holidays and submit time-off requests. Similarly, managers should be able to look at their team’s calendar and approve or reject time-off requests. This saves a lot of time, back and forth emails, and reduces human error. 

 

2. Team calendars

Team calendars are a great way to track who’s available and who’s not available at any given point. Employees can plan their respective work and manage dependencies. Managers also benefit from a unified calendar view to figure out the team’s availability and productivity trends. Hence, a team calendar is a must-have feature in a vacation tracker.

 

3. Multiple time-off policies

An organization can have numerous departments, shifts, geographical locations, etc. The vacation policy of each of the above may differ. There’s no one size fits all policy. Hence, your vacation tracker should have the ability to create multiple time-off policies and map employees under them. 

 

4. Multiple holiday calendars and workweeks

Your employees in the United States will not follow the same holiday calendar as your employees in Europe or India. Your employees in the Middle East follow a Sunday to Thursday work week while the American and European employees follow a Monday to Friday work schedule. Hence, your vacation tracker should be able to accommodate multiple holiday calendars, workweeks and map them to their respective time-off policies. 

 

5. Automatic accruals

Let’s face it. Calculating accruals manually is an uphill task and, quite frankly, an unwanted one. A good vacation tracker should handle several accrual types and calculate paid time-off accruals automatically, thus saving the HR personnel a lot of time and effort. You should also be able to define carryover rules and automate the entire process.

 

6. Integrations

Integrations are a vital component of any vacation tracker. An effective vacation tracker should integrate with many core HR solutions, employee database solutions, and payroll solutions. Time-offs and compensation are closely related. That’s why payroll integration becomes crucial.

 

7. Reports and insights

A high-quality vacation tracker comes with inbuilt reports on employee absence to help you understand your employees better. For example, sometimes, you may find that your employees are under-utilizing their vacation leave. In such cases, you may have to encourage and incentivize your employees to take time-offs to avoid burnout. You can also identify patterns on when employees are prone to take time-offs.

Benefits of using a Vacation Tracker

The HR department has a lot of essential responsibilities on its shoulders. Manual tracking of employee vacations will only add to their burden. A simple vacation tracker can help you save a lot of time and reap the following benefits:

Eliminates manual intervention

Tracking employee vacations manually is quite an ask and is prone to human errors. The larger the organization, the more significant is the risk of errors. Proper vacation tracker software eliminates manual intervention, back and forth emails for approvals and helps you and your employees to keep track of time-offs and leave balances.

Simplifies communication between employee and manager

An efficient vacation tracker ensures proper communication between employees and managers. Employees can request time-offs and get them approved from their managers in no time via automatic approval workflows. Vacation Trackers also allow you to configure notifications as per your preference. Thus, there’s no room for miscommunication.

Real-time data visibility

With a vacation tracker, employees will have real-time access to their time-off balances and leave data. They can instantly see how much paid time-off they have accrued, how much they can carry over, and their remaining vacation balance without having to run to the HR department every time.

Increases employee morale

When employees are given the freedom to take time-offs and vacations without tedious approval processes, it improves their morale drastically. With its efficient processes, a vacation tracker provides much-needed transparency, which in turn boosts employee morale.

Reduces payroll errors

No one wants to be underpaid when they are taking their well-deserved vacation. A vacation tracker reduces the possibility of such mistakes as it accurately keeps track of employee leave balances and time-offs. Integration of the vacation tracking software with a payroll management system makes it easier for the HR department to process paychecks.

Ensures legal compliance

An organization frames its vacation policy so that it is compliant with the labor laws of the state and country. An effective vacation tracker software ensures that the entire organization complies with the policy.

What is in store with Freshteam’s Vacation Tracker?

 

Multiple time-off/vacation policies

Freshteam allows you to create multiple time-off policies. Set up approval workflows, accrual policies, and carryover rules for each policy. You can create policies for different locations, departments, teams and map your employees under them.

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Approval workflows

You can set up approval workflows for each policy. The time-off request can be approved by the Reporting Manager, HR Business Partner, or Department Head based on your choice. You can even set up no approval.

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Holiday Calendar and Workweeks 

Freshteam comes with the in-built holiday calendar of 18 countries and lets you create new ones based on your region. You can also customize them based on your requirements.

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Reports and Insights

The Time-off Dashboard will give you extensive in-depth information about the time-off trend in your company with intelligent and straightforward analysis, stats, and graphs.

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