How to Keep Track of Employee Time Off and Still Deliver

Let’s play a game. 

(It’s not the one from the horror movie series, don’t worry.)

Without asking anyone, can you answer these four questions in under two minutes: 

If you answered no to any of these, you’re not alone—and you have a problem. Many professional services businesses struggle with time off management. And it’s not just about the general chaos of not knowing who’s where when. How you keep track of your team’s paid time off (and other absences) directly impacts your operations, the quality of your work, and ultimately your revenue.

In this article, we’ll tackle the common woes of leave management—and show you the path to a brighter future where you’ll never again have to wonder where Molly is and when she’s coming back.

Remember when vacation tracking meant looking at a calendar on the wall? Those days are as gone as the fax machine. Welcome to the era of remote teams, unlimited vacation days, mental health days, international holidays, contractor policies, and half-day requests.

No wonder so many of the managers we talk to describe leave tracking as “cumbersome,” complain that there’s “no easy way to see who’s out of the office” and want “better integration or replacement of their HR system.”

The modern workplace is a perfect storm of complexity. Here are just a few of the factors that make it so:

With so many businesses today embracing the hybrid or remote way of working, you can’t just look around to see who’s available. Are they working from home or are they out of office?

According to Paycom, employees can anticipate a 40% surge in leave requests in the summer. And what about Christmas, Rosh Hashanah, Bayram, Midsommar, snow season in Switzerland? There are always peak periods for absence requests, and probably not all of them can be absent at the same time.

As work-life balance becomes a bigger priority, more companies arere vacation time available means more requests. And more need for leave management.

It’s not just vacation time. It can be unpaid time off, sick leave, maternity and paternity days, personal time, half days, or the casual “I just need a couple of hours off.” The more flexible the policy, the more moving parts to track.

Cross-border teams are no longer rare and exotic. With the rise of remote work tools, they’ve become a standard part of the modern employment landscape. But global teams bring global complications: different national holidays, different labor laws, and often different time zones. What looks like a normal Monday to you might be a public holiday (and a compliance risk) somewhere else.

Many professional services firms run on a mix of full-time staff and freelancers. But contractors don’t always follow the same policies as employees—they may have flexible schedules, different availability, or other client commitments.

Tracking time off in today’s workplace demands a tool that can handle more than just “vacation vs. not vacation.” Productive gives you the flexibility to adapt absence management to your exact policies and processes:

With Productive, absence management isn’t a side process. It’s integrated into the same system you use for projects and resources, so tracking and managing leave requests becomes a natural part of planning.

Here’s a hypothetical situation. A 22-person creative agency tracks absences in a spreadsheet and runs projects in a separate tool. A major client campaign is due in August, but three key team members have overlapping vacations, which is not visible in the project tool. One week before the deadline, the project manager discovers the conflict.

What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?! (another movie reference here)

Management pulls emergency measures:

The campaign is delivered on schedule, but relationships are frayed. And it’s not just team morale that took a hit. These are the costs involved:

Add it up, and the “invisible” cost of poor absence tracking easily clears $15-20k on a single project—and that’s before factoring in long-term damage to relationships and culture.

The simple fix that could have prevented this? An integrated system where vacation requests live in the same place as project timelines and resource allocation.

While the illustrative scenario above is somewhat extreme, something as seemingly minor as tracking your team’s PTO has more repercussions for your business than you think.

Inefficient leave management puts you at risk of:

We’ve already established that leave management in AD 2025 is complex. Work dynamics are changing, and there are countless moving parts. From conversations with hundreds of customers, we’ve found that most struggles with tracking time off boil down to two issues:

Often, it’s a messy combination of both. We’ve seen businesses juggle Excel files, Google Workspace tools, email, Slack, shared calendars, even the plain old pen and paper. Sometimes an HR system or PTO tracker is in the mix, but it’s rarely connected to resource planning or project management.

Here’s what the process often looks like:

Aside from the fact that whatever you do manually is chronically unreliable, error-prone, and time-consuming, the core problem with this type of setup is that “people management” is completely separate from “work management.” Time-off information lives in tables, calendars, or admin tools, while project impact planning lives in project management systems. And like relatives holding a grudge, they never talk to each other.

Unlike many Instagram ads, we’re not here to sell you the fairytale of “one magical app” that solves a very real, very complex problem. Yes, tools matter. But tools alone won’t save your leave management if your process is broken.

If your current system is a mess, you need to do some housekeeping before you start shopping for platforms.

Start with ground rules: How many days of paid time off are available? Do they increase with tenure? Is unpaid leave an option? Are there collective company breaks? Do policies differ by role or location? We’re not here to write you HR manual for you—just to say that you need a policy, period.

How does someone actually request time off? Who approves it? What’s the timeline for making a request, and how soon should they expect an answer? Absence management starts with an ask and ends with visibility across the team. Map that flow.

Once you’ve defined your policy and process, put them where everyone can find them. It could be a handbook, a shared doc (Productive Docs work nicely), or even a glossy PDF—whatever works for you. The key is that the resource exists and people know exactly where to look.

Rules and resources mean nothing if you ignore them. Avoid ad hoc decisions unless something truly isn’t working. If you need to adjust the process, do it thoughtfully. Don’t set up a perfect project and then botch the execution.

Managing leave in spreadsheets or across disconnected tools will always leave gaps. An integrated system closes them—and gives you back control.

When absences live in the same system as your project timelines and resource allocation, you can catch conflicts before they become crises. In Productive, absence data feeds into your resource plan automatically. This can save you from overpromising and underdelivering, and give you the flexibility to handle urgent projects and last-minute opportunities.

Stop copying the same info across multiple systems. In Productive, approved time off triggers real-time updates to your resource plan, project timelines, and even Slack or external calendars. Less admin, fewer errors, and no more “Oh, I forgot to update that one.”

Your “people management” and “work management” finally talk to each other. When time off data isn’t trapped in an HR silo, every part of your business has access to the same real-time information. With custom time-off categories like those in Productive, you decide what affects availability and what doesn’t. This means better staffing decisions, more accurate project timeliness, and no more emergency scrambles.

Employees can see the status of their requests and their remaining balance, and managers can answer “who’s available next Tuesday?” in under two minutes. Everyone works from the same source of truth, cutting down on confusion and endless back-and-forth.

The modern workspace is complex, but tracking time off doesn’t have to be. With the right processes and an integrated system like Productive, you can see who’s off, when, and how it affects your projects—all without flipping between half a dozen tools or holding emergency meetings.

If you’re ready to stop guessing, start planning, and reclaim your weekends, book a demo and see how Productive makes leave management fully manageable.