It is essential for your company to keep track of your employees' planned vacation days. But your employees also want to be able to plan their vacation effectively. Various vacation planners can help you find the right workflow for your team. Find out here what Excel and six other tools have to offer.
Why a vacation planner makes sense
Vacation planning is a process that involves a lot of Time costs and to Disagreements in the team can lead to. If an employer grants 30 vacation days per year, each employee has around 6 weeks of vacation to plan, which they can spread over individual days or periods. It is important to consider all requests promptly and coordinate them successfully.
Especially in small teams, you should make sure that there is not too much overlap in vacation planning in order to ensure that operations are maintained and that the team's workload is reasonable. In larger teams, overlaps cannot be completely avoided; vacation substitutions and handovers are commonplace, making coordination all the more important. A digital vacation planner is highly recommended to ensure that everything runs smoothly.
How to create a vacation planner with Excel
With Excel, Microsoft's spreadsheet application, you can create your own vacation plan or use a ready-made template. If you want to create a new vacation planner from scratch in Excel, proceed as follows:
- Open an empty workbook in Excel.
- Enter the heading "Name" in the first column and then the names of all employees one below the other.
- The 365 days of the year form the headings of the next columns. All you have to do is enter a date (e.g. 01.01.2024) manually and drag it to the right using the black cross at the bottom right-hand edge of the cell to fill the cells with the following data.
- Fill columns with gray on holidays and weekends.
- You can make this simple table available to your team so that each team member has their own vacation overview per row.
- Your employees can enter the desired vacation days by color-coding the corresponding fields.
One disadvantage of this vacation plan, however, is that the table with 365 date columns is extremely wide and can quickly become confusing depending on the number of employees.
In addition, this system is only suitable if all team members handle the list responsibly. There is no automatic control. Furthermore, your employees have to check for themselves how much vacation they have left, when they can enter it and whether periods in the team are already taken.
Alternatively, only the line managers enter the vacation requests that they receive from the employees in written form. They could then make the Excel file read-only, but visible to everyone, so that everyone in the team knows when their colleagues will be absent. Depending on the size of the team, however, this means a lot of administrative work for the managers.
The advantage of using Excel as a vacation planner lies in its ease of use. If you are already using the program, your employees can use it directly and you do not need to purchase any additional tools. However, there are inexpensive or even free vacation planners that can immediately automate your process and make it more error-free. Let's take a look at six of these tools.
Other tools and software for vacation planning
Vacation planning is a process that is often structured and automated using tools, apps or programs. This saves time, enables efficient management and satisfies everyone involved thanks to fast and error-free processing.
These 6 tools can help you plan absences.
SAP Fiori
The Fiori tool is aimed at companies that use SAP. Absence management is already mapped in SAP. HR departments use SAP PA (Personnel Administration), while time administrators use TMW (Time Manager Workplace). This leaves a gap for employees, which you can close with a vacation planner in Fiori. The add-on combines all the necessary information to manage vacation planning completely in SAP from now on.
Personizer
A more streamlined solution is Personizer. The aim of the software is to enable simple personnel management for companies. Here you will find a tool with which you can perfectly manage vacation planning and time recording. These two functions are available with different levels of licensing.
TimeTac
TimeTac offers both a web-based solution and an app. The vacation planning app currently has rather poor ratings in the Google Play Store. However, the web solution promises a holistic system that covers the working hours, project times, vacation planner and absences modules.
timetape
timetape also advertises with a number of medium-sized companies that already use the tool as a vacation planner or for time recording. Here you can easily manage vacation requests and an automated approval process ensures the necessary transparency. Applicants and supervisors can see everything at a glance in the calendar view, which should guarantee structure and relief for your managers and employees.
Timebutler
It is said that more than 300,000 people use Timebutler's online time recording, vacation planner and absence management. The German company from Eltville scores with European data protection and high data security. Although Timebutler does not offer an app, you can of course open the web-based program in your browser on all end devices.
SeaTable
SeaTable is also web-based and can be operated in the cloud or on your own server. The database software from the German SeaTable GmbH also offers functions that enable many additional use cases. With SeaTable as your online vacation planner, you get:
- Simple web forms that your employees can use to submit vacation requests
- Automatic notifications for new vacation requests and approvals
- A calendar overview of all vacations
- An internal overview of remaining vacation days
- A separate view for each employee
The process is very simple: employees submit an application online using a web form. The line manager then receives a message about the new request. They can see whether there are any overlaps with other leave and accept or reject the request. The change then appears in the employee's individual view and the person receives a message.
The personal views ensure that data protection is guaranteed. In addition, everyone in the system only sees the information they really need.
The right vacation planner for your company
There are many tools for vacation planning. However, most of them are specific stand-alone solutions that really can't cover anything other than vacation planning and time recording. It is better to rely on a flexible solution that enables vacation planning as well as other use cases.
Find out more about SeaTable as a vacation planner here and adapt the free vacation planning template to your circumstances.