Most small companies start tracking holidays in a shared spreadsheet or a calendar. It works well enough for the first few people. Then two people book the same week, a balance is wrong at the end of the year, and nobody is sure who approved what.
This guide covers what a leave process for a team of roughly ten to fifty people actually needs, and the points where a spreadsheet stops being enough.
What a leave process has to answer
Whatever tool you use, it has to answer five questions without anyone digging:
- How much leave does each person have left this year?
- Who is away on a given day?
- Who decides a request, and did they?
- What happens when plans change after approval?
- Can the person see their own requests and balance without asking HR?
A spreadsheet can hold the answers, but nothing keeps them consistent. A balance is only right if someone remembered to update it, and the approval is only recorded if someone wrote it down.
Let the right person decide
In a small company the founder often approves every request. That stops scaling quickly. The person best placed to decide is usually the requester’s line manager, who knows the team’s workload, with an owner or HR admin able to step in.
Two rules matter here:
- Nobody approves their own request. This sounds obvious, but in a shared spreadsheet anyone can type “approved”.
- A decision is recorded with who made it and when, taken from who is signed in, not from a name someone types.
Keep balances honest
Balances go wrong in predictable ways: a request is approved but the balance is not reduced, a cancelled holiday is never added back, or a year rolls over and nobody resets the allowance. The fix is to let the balance follow the request automatically. Approving takes the days off, and cancelling an approved request gives them back exactly once.
Plan for changes after approval
Plans change. Someone books two weeks in August, then a family event moves. The process needs a clean way to cancel approved leave that returns the days and leaves a record of who cancelled it. It should not depend on the person quietly deleting a row.
Show who is out
A team calendar answers “can I book that week?” before anyone asks. Think about who sees what on it, though: the type of leave can be health or family information, which is personal data. The person deciding the request needs to know it; colleagues planning around an absence usually only need the dates.
How astraHR handles this
astraHR’s absence module covers these points. People request leave and see their own balance. Line managers decide their direct reports’ requests, alongside owners and admins, and nobody can decide their own. Each decision records who made it and when. Approved leave can be cancelled by a manager or admin, and the days are returned once. Managers and admins can see who is away on any day in a team calendar. Absence is part of the Core plan.