For companies, it is important to keep track of employees' planned holidays. But as an employee, you also want to be able to plan your leave sensibly. Various holiday planners help to find the right workflow for you. Find out here what Excel and five other tools offer and how SeaTable facilitates this process.
Holiday planning is a process that takes a lot of time and can lead to disagreements within the team. It is important to consider all requests in a timely manner. Duplication must be avoided and a suitable workload for the team must be found. The law entitles employees to 20 days of leave per year for a 5-day working week. This must be successfully coordinated.
How does holiday planning work with Excel?
With Excel, you can create your own holiday schedule yourself as a table or purchase a ready-made template. If you want to create your own template for holiday planning, proceed as follows:
- Enter the heading "Name" and the names of the employees in the first column below each other.
- The days of the year form the headings of the next columns.
- You only have to enter a date for this. Next, use the black cross at the bottom right edge of the cell to drag the data to the right.
- You can share the table with your team so that each employee has a holiday overview and can enter their own holiday requests.
- The holiday wishes can be entered by coloured markings in the corresponding fields.
This system is only suitable if everyone handles the list responsibly. There is no automatic control. Furthermore, employees must check themselves whether they can enter leave at that time or whether the period is already occupied.
Holiday planner © Araki Illustrations / adobe stock
Alternatively, only the supervisor operates the Excel leave planner. He or she receives the requests from the employees in written form. The file is read-only, but visible to all, so that everyone knows when colleagues will be away.
The advantage of Excel as a tool for holiday planning is that it is initially easy to use. If the programme is already in use, there is no need to purchase additional tools. However, free or low-cost holiday planners exist that can make your process more automatic and error-free from now on. Let's take a look at five of the holiday planners.
What other holiday planners, tools and software are there?
Holiday planning is a process that is readily automated by tools, apps and programmes. This saves time, enables efficient management of the workforce and satisfies employees due to the fast and error-free processing.
These 5 programmes can help you plan for absenteeism.
Holiday planner © tippapatt / adobe stock
Fiori holiday planning
The Fiori tool is aimed at companies that use SAP. Absence management is already mapped in SAP. Human resources departments use SAP PA (Personnel Administration) and time officers use TMW (Time Manager Workplace). For employees, there remains a gap in leave planning that has to be covered with Excel lists. This is where you can take a look at Fiori. The add-on combines all the necessary information to manage holiday planning completely in SAP from now on.
Personizer
A more streamlined solution is Personizer. The 6-man company was founded as part of the CRASH group. The aim was to provide simple time tracking for companies. Here you will find a tool with which you can perfectly manage holiday planning and absenteeism. A distinction is made in licensing between two functions: the tracking of working hours and the management of absences.
TimeTac
TimeTac offers both a web-based solution and an app. The app for holiday planning currently has rather poor ratings in the Google Play store. However, the web solution promises an interesting additional function: the 3G or 2G status of employees can be recorded. In the TimeTac Health function, people enter their status. Subsequently, absences can be enriched with the information.
timetape
timetape advertises a number of medium-sized companies that already use the tool for holiday planning. Simple holiday requests can be managed and created here. An automated approval process ensures the necessary transparency in holiday planning. Employees and request administrators can see everything at a glance in the calendar view.
SeaTable
SeaTable is web-based and can be cloud-based, self-hosted or run on a dedicated server. With SeaTable as your online holiday planner you get:
- A management tool for leave requests.
- Notifications about new holiday requests.
- A calendar plug-in as an overview.
- An internal overview of remaining leave days.
- A separate view per employee.
Employees submit a request online using the integrated web form. The supervisor then receives a message about the new request. He or she can see if there are any duplicate data and accept or reject the request.
The change then appears in the employee's individual view and the person is notified.
The person-related views ensure that data protection is guaranteed with regard to leave applications. In addition, everyone only sees the functions in the system that they really need.
The right solution for your company
There are many tools for holiday planning. However, most are either too specific, with single templates to download, or too extensive.
It is better to rely on a solution that enables holiday planning as well as other use cases.
Learn more about SeaTable as a holiday planner here. Adapt the general holiday planning template to your circumstances.
Image source Cover image: © Andrey Popov/Adobe Stock
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