How to Track Employee Time Off | 4 Steps To Track Your Team's Holidays and Leave

TripLog Team

Without the right tools, keeping track of your team's vacation and other sorts of leave can be quite difficult. If you're still utilizing spreadsheets and other antiquated techniques, it may be time to look into more practical time tracking options, like TripLog Time.

You can manage your team's paid and unpaid time off with TripLog Time in addition to tracking work hours. 

TripLog Time is a fantastic PTO & vacation tracker that also makes it simple to develop and administer a variety of leave policies. We'll go over step-by-step methods for tracking employee vacation time in TripLog Time in this article. 

We'll walk you through each stage of managing your team's: 

  • Vacation 
  • Sick time 
  • Holidays (non-working days) (non-working days) 
  • Different forms of PTO (unlimited PTO, religious days, half-days, etc.)

Tracking Employee Time Off Explained

The significance of having a PTO policy that is clearly defined. If you're organized, tracking PTO for salaried employees shouldn't be too challenging. To be able to control how much time your employees take off, you must first set your PTO policy. 

There are two types of policies you may choose from: traditional (with a predetermined amount of days or hours), and unlimited (where employees can take as many off days as they like).

Related: The 10 Best SMB Employee Scheduling Software (2023)

It's crucial to define it precisely so that:

  • Employees are aware of the ideal PTO usage. 
  • The vacation time for your employees is simple to manage.

You can use a paid time off tracker to implement the policy after you've defined it. 

If you still don't have a PTO policy in place, you can easily find a variety of PTO templates on Google that you may customize for your company's requirements. However, the most convenient and still customizable method is using a dedicated time tracking app.

TripLog Time: The Best Way to Track Your Team’s Time Off

You may track all types of leave with TripLog Time's Time Off tool. With the help of TripLog Time's Time Off function, you can conveniently manage holidays, vacations, and any other kind of leave you can imagine. 

Following that, you must perform the following to enable the feature in your workspace settings: 

  • Make your office settings visible. 
  • Locate "Time off" on the page by scrolling down. 
  • Use the toggle button to make the feature active. 

It will show up on your sidebar if you enable the feature in your workspace settings.

Related: 4 Ways Workers Steal Time (And 6 Ways To Prevent It)

You may create, access, and manage all of your leave policies here. 

We'll go into depth about using TripLog Time's Time Off tool to design various leave policies and easily keep track of your team's vacation time in the sections that follow. 

How to track your team's vacations using TripLog Time 

We'll outline the seven actions you need to follow to track your team's vacation time because vacation often consumes the majority of the employees' PTO. They consist of:

  1. Setting up your policy 
  2. Managing time off balance 
  3. How to Request Vacation Time/PTO
  4. Managing Requests for Time Off

Tracking Employee Time Off Step #1: Setting up your policy

TripLog Time makes it incredibly easy to set up your team’s time management policies. After you set up your TripLog Time account, hover over the “Manage” button and click “Settings”. 

On the right, you will see an option for “Time Policies”. After you click that, scroll down, and you will see the necessary settings for “Time Off” and “Holidays”.

Related: How to Track Employee Hours - 3 Easy Ways for 2023

From here, you can add new “Time-off Types” such as sick days, mental health days, etc., as well as define custom pay periods. TripLog Time also can auto-generate a time clock for holidays. 

You can even set up an approval process for your employee time clocks here. If you have any further questions or concerns, please contact our support team.

Tracking Employee Time Off Step #2: Managing Time Off Balance

Now that your policy has been created, you are able to specify the amount of days or hours each individual team member may use in accordance to your policy.

To set this up, go to the “Users” page in the TripLog Time dashboard, select a user, and click the “Time” tab. From here, you can choose the leave type, start date, annual accrual, and allowed rollover amount.

You are able to see their time-off balance as well, with their remaining balance calculated by their “Annual Accrual” minus the amount they used.

If you want to add multiple employee’s time-off balance, you can hover over the “Import” button on the “Users” page, select “Import Time-Off Schedule”, and follow the instructions.

Tracking Employee Time Off Step #3: How to Request Vacation Time/PTO

After you have set up your company time policy and assigned a balance to your team members, they are now able to request time off!

Related: What Happens When Employees Commit Time Theft? | Is Time Theft a Crime?

They can either use the TripLog Time app, or via our web dashboard. In the app, all they need to do is click the “More” button on the bottom dock, select the “Time off” button, and request days as needed.

On the dashboard, they will need to hover over the “Time” option in the top menu and select “Time Off”. From here, they must select “Request Leave” in the top left corner.

Managers and admins can also add team members’ PTO requests in the same place. For example, if an employee doesn’t have access to the app or dashboard, they can ask their admin to create the request for them.

Tracking Employee Time Off #4: Managing Requests for Time Off

Managing your team’s time off requests is easy and intuitive. On the TripLog Time dashboard, hover over “Time” and select “Time Off”.

Here, managers and admins can see all of their team’s requests in one convenient place, and approve or reject their requests as needed. Managers are also able to get email notifications when an employee requests time off.

On the “Time Off” page, you are able to see a color-coded calendar view of your team’s PTO requests. They will be either submitted, rejected, or approved.

You can click any request to see additional information, and add it to your time clock or reject it. Your team will be notified via email when their request is approved or rejected.

How to monitor sick days for your team with TripLog Time 

Your sick leave policy will determine how you track the sick days for your workforce. You would create a sick leave policy in TripLog Time in the same way as you would a vacation policy if your policy permits a predetermined number of sick days every pay period (let's say, 10 days a year).

Related: 6 Reasons Why GPS Time Clocks Are Essential For Small Businesses

You are able to see your team’s negative balance under their user card in the “Users” page under the “Manage” tab. You and your team are able to submit and approve sick days that go beyond their allowed accrual, but it will be considered a negative balance.

Tracking Holidays With TripLog Time

TripLog Time makes it easy and intuitive to track your company’s holiday policies. You can find the settings to manage holidays in the “Time Policies” tab of the settings page.

Click the “Add Holiday” button to create a new holiday. For example, you can call a holiday set on January 1st to be New Year’s Day.

You can also click the “Auto Generate Time Clock for Holidays” button to create a “Holiday” time entry for every hourly worker one day before the holiday.

Using TripLog Time to Track Other Types of Leave

In the “Time Off” section of the “Time Policies” tab in the settings page, you are able to add any type of time policy you would like.

Click the “Add Time-off Type” button and name your leave type. Some different types of leave many companies implement are maternity leave, unpaid leave, religious days, etc.

Related: Employee GPS Tracking Laws | Can My Employer Track My Location?

You can also allow your team to take half days. Simply have them use half the amount of hours of PTO they would use normally.

Conclusion: Try TripLog Time, the #1 Employee Time Tracker!

TripLog Time allows you to easily manage your team’s time off, as well as set up custom PTO policies. To get started, schedule a complimentary demo with our sales team.

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