A vacation tracker that knows who is off before you build the schedule.

The simplest way for a 10 to 50 person business to track vacation and leave is one shared system where employees file requests, a manager approves or denies them, balances update on their own, and the schedule refuses to book anyone who is away. ClockOut does all four inside the same app your team already uses to clock in and read the schedule, so there is no second HR tool to log into and no spreadsheet to keep in sync. Requests and approvals are on every plan, including Free; balances, accruals and blackout dates are on Starter and Pro.

How requests and approvals work

A leave tracker is only as good as the habit around it. ClockOut keeps the habit short: one place to ask, one place to answer, and nothing to copy anywhere afterwards.

1. 01

   The employee requests time off

   They pick a start date, an end date and a type (vacation, sick, personal or other) and add a note if they want to explain. A request that overlaps a company blackout period is refused at submission. A request that already ended cannot be filed, but one covering today can, which is what a sick day needs.

2. 02

   Managers are told right away

   Every owner, admin and manager gets an email with the employee’s name, the type, the dates and the note. On Starter and Pro they also get an in-app notification and a push alert on their phone, so a Saturday request does not sit until Monday.

3. 03

   Approve or deny with a note

   The requests inbox lists everything pending. A manager approves or denies and can attach a note, for example why a date did not work. The employee gets an email and a notification with the decision and the note, and the decision is written to the audit log with who made it.

4. 04

   Balances and the schedule update themselves

   Approval deducts the hours from the matching balance, marks the days on the schedule grid, removes any shifts the employee had already been assigned in that range, and cancels pending shift swaps that pointed at them. If the employee cancels before the leave starts, exactly the hours that were deducted come back.

Vacation, sick, personal and unpaid leave

Every request and every policy carries a type: vacation, sick, personal or other. That is what lets one tracker handle vacation and sick leave without the two borrowing from each other: a deduction only ever comes out of a policy of the matching type, so an approved sick day cannot quietly spend vacation hours.

Unpaid leave does not need a special mode. Request it under a type that has no policy assigned (most teams use “other”). The request still goes through approval, still shows on the schedule and still blocks shifts, but no balance is touched. Paid sick leave rules differ by state and city, and ClockOut does not encode any of them. Your written policy decides what people earn; ClockOut records the requests, approvals and balances behind it.

Balances every employee can check

“How many days do I have left” is the question that eats a manager’s week. On Starter and Pro, each employee has a time off page with available hours, used hours and anything still pending, then a row per policy with available, accrued, used and carryover hours. Admins see the same numbers for the whole company in one balances table, and can add or remove hours from any balance with a required reason that lands in the audit log.

Balances come from policies. A policy has a type, an accrual rate in hours, an accrual period of monthly, biweekly or yearly, an optional cap, a year-end carryover limit, and whether a negative balance is allowed. A nightly job adds the hours that are due, and on January 1 (in your company’s timezone) balances above the carryover limit are trimmed to it. Give vacation and sick time separate policies with separate rates. The full accrual rules, including what is not configurable, are on the PTO tracker page.

Who is off next week: leave on the schedule

Tracking leave is half the job. The other half is not scheduling somebody who is away. The admin schedule grid, the same one you build shifts on, marks each employee’s approved leave on the days it covers, labeled with the type, and pages forward a week at a time. Coverage gaps show up while you are planning rather than on the morning of the shift.

The block is enforced. Assigning a shift on a date covered by approved leave is refused, on a single shift and on a bulk repeat. Approving leave also removes shifts already assigned in that range and leaves open shifts alone for someone else to claim. There is no separate wall calendar of leave; the schedule grid is the team time-off view, because that is where the decision about coverage gets made. See the rest on employee scheduling.

A free vacation tracker spreadsheet, and where it breaks

If you have fewer than ten people and one manager, a sheet is a fair place to start. Keep it to one tab and these columns, one row per request:

• Employee, type (vacation, sick, personal, unpaid), start date, end date.
• Business days in the range, excluding weekends and paid holidays, and hours (business days times eight).
• Status (pending, approved, denied, cancelled), approved by and approved on.
• A second tab per employee with opening balance, accrued, used and remaining, updated by hand each period.

That layout fails in a predictable order. First the accrual tab goes stale because nobody remembers to add hours. Then a second manager approves a week that overlaps the first manager’s approval, because the sheet does not know the schedule. Then an employee asks for their balance and gets three different answers. Past ten people, the sheet costs more in corrections than the software does in dollars.

What a vacation tracker costs for 10, 15 or 25 people

ClockOut is free for up to 2 active employees. Starter is $19 a month for up to 5 people, then $3 per extra person. Pro is $39 a month for up to 5, then $6 each. Both have a 14-day free trial, and paying annually takes 20% off. Requesting and approving leave is on every plan; policies, accruals, balances and blackout dates are on Starter and Pro. The prices below are for the whole app, time clock and scheduling included, not for leave tracking alone.

Full plan detail is on the pricing page, and every plan limit is restated with its numbers in the product facts.

Built for teams of 10 to 50

Under ten people, the owner knows who is off because they were told in person. Over fifty, you usually have an HR platform with a leave module attached. In between is where most restaurants, shops, clinics, crews and warehouses live, and where a leave tracker has to be cheap, work on a phone, and talk to the schedule. ClockOut is that middle: the time clock, the schedule and leave in one app, at $34 a month for ten people.

Set it up in an afternoon

• Add your team and send the invite. Employees log in from a phone browser or the iPhone or Android app.
• On Starter or Pro, create a policy per leave type, assign it, and type in each person’s current balance straight off the old sheet. That is the last time the numbers move by hand.
• Enter paid holidays so they stop consuming leave, and any blackout ranges such as your busiest month.
• Send one message: requests go in ClockOut, not in texts.

Vacation and leave tracker FAQ

Related pages

• PTO tracker: accrual policies, caps, carryover and balance adjustments in detail.
• Employee scheduling: building the week around approved leave and availability.
• How to track PTO accruals for hourly employees: writing the policy and picking the rate.
• Time and attendance system: the time clock and timesheets that sit beside leave.
• The ClockOut app: iPhone and Android for requesting leave and reading the schedule.
• Pricing: current plans and checkout.